Languages of India
Until the Twenty-first Amendment of the Constitution of India in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Meitei and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, as of 1 December 2007, lists 22 languages, which are given in the table below together with the speaking population and the regions where they are used. 
The individual states, the borders of most of which are or were drawn on socio-linguistic lines, can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. The official languages chosen reflect the predominant as well as politically significant languages spoken in that state. Certain states having a linguistically defined territory may have only the predominant language in that state as its official language, examples being Karnataka and Gujarat, which have Kannada and Gujarati as their sole official language respectively. Telangana, with a sizeable Urdu-speaking Muslim population, has two languages, Telugu and Urdu, as its official languages.
List of lingua francas
Nepali is the lingua franca of the many ethnic, religious and cultural communities of Nepal, and is also spoken in Bhutan, parts of India and parts of Myanmar (Burma). It is one of 23 official languages of India incorporated in 8th annex of the Indian Constitution. It has official language status in the formerly independent state of Sikkim and in West Bengal's Darjeeling district. Similarly, it is spoken by the Nepalese living in the state of Assam and other Northeast Indian states. While Nepali is closely related to the Hindi–Urdu complex and is mutually intelligible to a degree, it has more Sanskritic derivations and fewer Persian or English loan words. Nepali is commonly written in the Devanagari script, as are Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi.