Vital Statistics: Languages of India

[Yashwant Malaiya]

Artur Karp wrote:

>I need the freshest possible data on major languages of India -
>could you please direct me to a web page with solidly grounded
>statistics (I know of Ethnologue)?

>How many constitutional languages does India possess at present?

You can not get it from a more authoritative source than the
Census of India web-site ('91 data):

http://www.censusindia.net/language.html

The Ethnologue enumeration scheme is quite curious. Among the
major languages of the world they include:

46 AWADHI
71 HARYANVI
72 MARWARI
75 MAGAHI
76 CHHATTISGARHI
77 DECCAN

As a result they are able to adjust the ranking of the
top few languages of the world.

Who runs "Ethnologue"? Is it a committee of academic
researchers? What is their objective?

Yashwant