Languages with official status in India
The Indian constitution, in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union. Unless Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into effect, i.e., on 26 January 1965. The prospect of the changeover, however, led to much alarm in the non Hindi-speaking areas of India, especially Dravidian-speaking states whose languages were not related to Hindi at all. As a result, Parliament enacted the ,
Himachal Pradesh
Hindi is the official language of Himachal Pradesh and is spoken by the majority of the population as a lingua franca. English is given the status of an additional official language. Most of the languages spoken natively belong to the group of the Himachali languages. According to the 2001 Census of India, the languages spoken in the state in descending order of native speakers are Hindi, spoken by 89.01% of the population (including Himachali languages as dialects of Hindi); followed by Punjabi (5.99%), Nepali (1.16%) and Kinnauri (1.06%).