List of Indian languages by number of native speakers

India is home to several hundred languages. Most Indians speak a language belonging to the families of the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European (c. 74%), the Dravidian (c. 24%), the Austroasiatic (Munda) (c. 1.2%), or the Sino-Tibetan (c. 0.6%), with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified. The SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living languages for India.

India has 23 constitutionally recognized official languages. Hindi and English are the official languages used by the Central Government. State governments use respective official languages.

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in northern parts of India. The Indian census takes the widest possible definition of "Hindi" as a broad variety of "Hindi languages". According to 2001 Census even though 45% of Indian population know Hindi, only 25% of them have declared Hindi as their native language or mother tongue. Indian English is recorded as the native language of 226,449 Indians in the 2001 census.

Thirteen languages account for more than 1% of Indian population each, and between themselves for over 95%; all of them are "scheduled languages of the constitution". Scheduled languages spoken by fewer than 1% of Indians are Santali (0.63%), Kashmiri (0.54%), Nepali (0.28%), Sindhi (0.25%), Konkani (0.24%), Dogri (0.22%), Meitei (0.14%), Bodo (0.13%) and Sanskrit (In the 2001 census of India, only 14,135 people reported Sanskrit as their native language). The largest language that is not "scheduled" is Bhili (0.95%), followed by Gondi (0.27%), Khandeshi (0.21%), Tulu (0.17%) and Kurukh (0.10%).

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