The Constitution of India designates a bilingual approach for
official language of the
Government of India employing usage of
Hindi written in the
Devanagari script, as well as
English.
Hindi and
English find everyday use for important official purposes such as parliamentary proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and a State Government. States within India have the liberty and powers to specify their own official language(s) through legislation and therefore there are more than 20 officially recognized languages in India, including
Assamese,
English,
Sindhi,
Hindi,
Punjabi,
Nepali,
Bengali,
Odia,
Telugu,
Tamil,
Malayalam,
Kannada,
Gujarati,
Marathi,
Urdu etc. The number of native
Hindi speakers range between 14.5 to 24.5% in total Indian population, however, other dialects of Hindi termed as
Hindi languages are spoken by nearly 45% of Indians, mostly accounted from the states falling under the
Hindi belt. Other Indian languages are each spoken by around 10% or less of the population.