India Lists 22 Languages in the Eighth Schedule, Names Hindi the Union's Official Language, and Keeps English in Use by Law Until Every Non-Hindi State Agrees to End It

Article 343 of the Constitution makes Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union, and the Eighth Schedule lists 22 languages. In the 2011 Census, 96.71 percent of Indians gave one of those 22 as their mother tongue.

The two lists do separate jobs. A third rule lets each state choose its own official language. A fourth, an ordinary law of 1963, decides how long English stays in central government work. Most arguments about “the official language” come from treating these four arrangements as one.

What Article 343 says

Clause (1) names Hindi in Devanagari as the Union’s official language and says the numerals for Union purposes take the international form of Indian numerals. Clause (2) kept English in use for fifteen years from the Constitution’s commencement for every purpose it already served, and let the President authorise Hindi alongside it. Clause (3) lets Parliament by law keep English, or Devanagari numerals, in use after those fifteen years for purposes it names.

Article 343 took effect on 26 January 1950, the date Article 394 fixes for the Constitution’s commencement. The Constituent Assembly took up the language article on 12 September 1949 and adopted it on 14 September, according to the Constitution of India archive, which calls the draft the Munshi-Ayyangar formula. Members opposed to Hindi accepted it reluctantly. Hindi supporters pressed for a shorter transition and for Devanagari numerals. The Assembly’s language debate and the drafting of the Constitution are covered in their own articles.

Article 344 built in a review. The President must appoint a Commission after five years and again every ten years, with members drawn from the Eighth Schedule languages. A committee of 30 (20 members of the Lok Sabha and 10 of the Rajya Sabha) examines its report, and the President may then issue directions that apply even where Article 343 would say otherwise.

The 1963 law that keeps English in use

The fifteen years ended on 26 January 1965. Parliament had already passed the Official Languages Act (Act 19 of 1963, dated 10 May 1963), whose Section 3 came into force on that day. It says English “may, as from the appointed day, continue to be used in addition to Hindi” for all Union purposes and for business in Parliament.

Three rules in Section 3 matter in practice. English must be used for communication between the Union and a state that has not adopted Hindi as its official language. Resolutions, rules, notifications, contracts and reports laid before Parliament must be issued in both languages. And the provisions on English stay in force until the legislatures of all the states that have not adopted Hindi, and each House of Parliament, pass resolutions ending it.

That last condition came with an amendment, Act 1 of 1968, which took effect on 8 January 1968 and substituted Section 3. The columnist Kuldip Nayar, writing in The Daily Star in 2017, placed the change after the unrest of 1965. He reported that students protested the switch to Hindi in what was then Madras state, that a riot began in Madurai, and that nearly 70 people died. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri then repeated Nehru’s assurance that English would stay as long as non-Hindi states wanted it, and Nayar says the riots subsided.

The law sets no end date. English can leave Union business only if every such state legislature and both Houses vote for it.

How the rules work in a government office

The Official Languages Rules of 1976 (G.S.R. 1052, 17 July 1976) turn the Act into daily procedure by sorting states and Union Territories into three regions. The Department of Official Language lists them as amended in 1987, 2007 and 2011.

• Region A: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
• Region B: Gujarat, Maharashtra and Punjab, with Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
• Region C: every other state and Union Territory.

Under Rule 5, central offices write to Region A in Hindi, to Region B ordinarily in Hindi with a translation if the original is in English, and to Region C in English. A reply to a letter received in Hindi must be in Hindi (Rule 9), and an employee may submit an application or representation in either language (Rule 11).

The courts follow a different rule. Article 348 keeps English as the language of all proceedings in the Supreme Court and the High Courts, with one exception: a Governor may authorise Hindi or the state’s official language in High Court proceedings with the President’s prior consent, though judgments stay in English. Four High Courts use Hindi that way, according to a Law Minister’s Lok Sabha reply that Verdictum reported on 11 February 2023: Rajasthan (1950), Uttar Pradesh (1969), Madhya Pradesh (1971) and Bihar (1972). Proposals from Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Karnataka to use their own languages went to the Supreme Court’s Full Court, which decided not to accept them.

The Eighth Schedule and its 22 languages

The Schedule opened in 1950 with 14 languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya (now spelled Odia), Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Three amendments added the other eight.

• Sindhi, by the 21st Amendment, dated 10 April 1967. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons says Sindhi had been the language of a province of undivided India, that Sindhi speakers had long asked for inclusion, and that the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities recommended it.
• Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali, by the 71st Amendment, assented to on 31 August 1992.
• Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, by the 92nd Amendment. The bill introduced on 18 August 2003 named only Bodo, and the other three were added during debate. It passed the Lok Sabha on 22 December 2003 and the Rajya Sabha the next day, and received assent on 7 January 2004.

Listing does not make a language the Union’s official language, which only Article 343 does. Under Article 344 the Commission’s members represent the Schedule’s languages. The Official Language Resolution of 1968 also allows all Eighth Schedule languages and English as alternative media for All India and higher Central Services examinations, after consulting the Union Public Service Commission. States pick their own official languages, and the Act’s wording takes that for granted when it speaks of “a State which has not adopted Hindi as its Official Language”. The Schedule is also the working list for India’s AI language projects.

The Census shows how the list maps onto the country. The 2011 Census, published by the Registrar General, recorded 19,569 raw mother-tongue names, rationalised to 1,369 mother tongues, and grouped them into 121 languages, 22 scheduled and 99 not. Hindi was the mother tongue of 52,83,47,193 people, or 43.63 percent. The Census counts mother tongues such as Bhojpuri (5,05,79,447 speakers) under Hindi, which is a grouping decision and not a statement about how those speakers describe themselves. Sanskrit was returned by 24,821 people, and English, listed as a non-scheduled language, by 2,59,678.

Whether to add more languages is contested. Communities have asked for recognition for decades. A note in the Delhi Journal of Contemporary Law quotes the Home Ministry’s RTI reply of 16 June 2025 as saying there are no prescribed norms for inclusion, that 38 proposals are pending, and that attempts to fix criteria, the Pahwa Committee of 1996 and the Sitakant Mohapatra Committee of 2003, were inconclusive. The Ministry withheld both committees’ reports, saying disclosure could spark public uproar.

Three languages in school

The 1968 resolution also set out the three-language formula. Hindi-speaking areas teach Hindi, English and a modern Indian language, preferably a southern one. Non-Hindi areas teach Hindi, the regional language and English.

The National Education Policy of 2020 keeps the formula. A Minister of State for Education told the Rajya Sabha on 19 March 2025 that the policy allows greater flexibility, with the states, regions and students choosing the three languages, at least two of them native to India, and that “no language will be imposed on any state”. Tamil Nadu has refused to implement the formula, alleging that Hindi is being imposed, according to the PTI report. The Centre rejects that charge.

Eleven classical languages

Separately, the Government created a “classical language” category in 2004. The Ministry of Culture’s explainer says the criteria were revised in 2005 and 2024 to require early texts or recorded history spanning 1,500 to 2,000 years. Tamil was recognised on 12 October 2004, Sanskrit on 25 November 2005, Telugu and Kannada on 31 October 2008, Malayalam on 8 August 2013 and Odia on 1 March 2014. On 3 October 2024 the Union Cabinet added Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali, which brought the total to 11. The status brings national awards, university chairs and centres of study.