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 ,
South India
The largest linguistic group in South India is the Dravidian family of languages, a family of approximately 73 languages The major languages spoken include Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Tulu is spoken by about 1.5 million people in coastal Kerala and Karnataka and Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, is spoken by half a million people in the Konkan coast. English is also widely spoken in urban areas of South India. Urdu is spoken by around 12 million Muslims in southern India. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu and Konkani are listed amongst the 22 official languages of India as per the Official Languages Act (1963). Tamil was the first language to be granted classical language status by the Government of India in 2004. Other major languages declared classical were Kannada (in 2008), Telugu (in 2008) and Malayalam (in 2013)