SystemOfASideways t1_iruqu2d wrote
Reply to comment by PM_ME_A_PLANE_TICKET in TIL according to the Census of India of 2001, India has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages by Sistermateriial
The census simply recorded people's responses for what their native language was, so the number is significantly overinflated due to some languages having multiple names or people claiming for religious reasons that they spoke dead languages when they actually didn't. Most sources I can find say that India has around 450 spoken languages
The discrepancies in how the census counts languages between different years is how you end up with vastly different numbers. One year there are said to be ~2600 languages, then ~19,500 (Nearly 3 times the amount of languages estimated to exist in the whole world), and then ~1600
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