What at the top 5 to 10 languages spoken in India, based on % of the population?

Question

I have a list on this site, but no population figures to go with it. I can only include 5 to 10 in the survey I am writing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_languages_of_India

Answer 1

I'd go for:
1) Hindi
2) Bengali
3) Tamil
4) Urdu
5) Marathi
6) Punjabi
7) Telugu
8) Malayalam
9) Kannada
10) Konkani

Sanskrit is the language used by the Brahman cast for their readings. It's basically a dead language although I hear Bollywood made a film in Sanskrit recently and Deutsche Welle had a Sanskrit broadcast beamed at India until a while ago. Similarly English is the second language of all educated Indians, but since it's not the mother tongue of any of them, I haven't listed it.

Answer 2

Top 10 Languages Spoken In India

Answer 3

I knew Chinese was spoken the most, but I didn't know some of those other languages were spoken a lot as well! (you learn something everyday) I really like all languages since they derive from one common language (such as Sanskrit and Latin). I know how to speak 4 languages, and I'm learning Spanish- which would make 5 if I fully knew it. The four languages that I actually do know are English, Hindi, Bengali, and Oriya. =)

Answer 4

Modern India, as per the 1961 count, has more than 1652 mother tongues, genetically belonging to five different language families. Apart from them 527 mother tongues were considered unclassifiable at that time.
The 1991 Census had 10,400 raw returns and they were rationalized into 1576 mother tongues. They are further rationalized into 216 mother tongues, and grouped under 114 languages: Austro-Asiatic (14 languages, with a total population of 1.13%), Dravidian (17 languages, with a total population of 22.53%), Indo-European (Indo-Aryan, 19 languages, with a total population of 75.28%, and Germanic, 1 language, with a total population of 0.02%), Semito-Harmitic (1 language, with a total population of 0.01%), and Tibeto-Burman (62 languages with a total population of 0.97%).
The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by the maximum number of speakers, followed in the descending order by the Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) languages.
Eighteen Indian languages, namely, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu are spoken by 96.29% of the population of the country and the remaining 3.71% of the population speak rest of the languages.
Date: 4 april 2004

Answer 5

This table shows total numbers of speakers in the world, not just India. A large portion of the Bengali speakers would live in Bangla Desh, and Urdu and Punjabi speakers in Pakistan. For numbers of speakers in India look up India on http://www.ethnologue.com/

Hindi 366,000,000
Bengali 207,000,000
Telugu 69,666,000
Marathi 68,022,000
Tamil 66,000,000
Urdu 60,290,000
Punjabi 57,129,000
Gujarati 46,100,000
Malayalam 35,706,000
Kannada 35,346,000
Oriya 32,300,000
Bhojpuri 26,254,000
Maithili 24,191,900
Awadhi 20,540,000
Sindhi 19,720,000
Nepali 16,056,000
Assamese 15,374,000
Saraiki 15,059,000
Chittagonian 14,000,000
Sinhala 13,220,000
Marwari 13,183,000
Haryanvi 13,000,000
Magahi 13,000,000
Chhattisgarhi 11,535,000
Deccan 10,709,800

Answer 6

Well just by looking at it, I would say that Hindi (obviously, since its the official language) and Sanskrit are the most dominent languages. I say Sanskrit because if you read the description, it says that its the main language of the major religions in India and its required for teaching. Hope that helps =)

Answer 7

hindi, urdu,marati,tamil,telugu
malayalam,punjabi,gujarati,
bengali,kannada