India is a country of diverse culture. It has 22 official languages and over a thousand spoken languages. This site is an effort to provide information on each known Indian Language.
Individual mother tongues in India number several hundred. According to Census of India of 2001, 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. Two languages have played an important role in the history of India: Persian and English.
Sanskrit and Tamil are the classical languages of India according to the Government.
Article 343 of the Indian Constitution recognises Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language of central government India. The Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "official languages" of the union to include any language adopted by a state legislature as the official language of that state. In effect, there are "official languages" at the state and center level but no one "national language".

Until the Twenty-First Amendment of the Constitution in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. The Constitution of India recognises 22 languages, spoken in different parts the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Hindi is an official language of the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Marathi is an official language of Maharashtra. Punjabi is a official language of Punjab. Gujarati is the official language of Gujarat. Tamil is a official language of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Malayalam is the official language of Kerala and Lakshadweep. Kannada is the official language of Karnataka. Telugu is the official language of Andhra Pradesh. English is the co-official language of the Indian Union.

Source: www.indianlanguages.com