CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 68 of 120

Correct — C, Indo-Aryan. The 2011 Census puts about 78 per cent of Indians in the Indo-Aryan group — the Indo-European total is 945,333,910 speakers, or 78.07 per cent — and no other family comes close. Dravidian is second with 237,840,116 speakers, 19.64 per cent. Austroasiatic, which older Indian textbooks call Austric, accounts for 13,493,080 speakers or 1.11 per cent, and Sino-Tibetan for 12,257,382, almost exactly 1 per cent. Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Nepali and Urdu are all Indo-Aryan, which is why the total is so large.

• (a)Sino-Tibetan — Sino-Tibetan speakers number about 12.26 million, roughly 1 per cent. The family covers most languages of the north-eastern hills and the Himalayan belt — Bodo, Manipuri, Mizo, Naga and Tibetan among them — but its speakers are few.
• (b)Austric — Austric, the older name for the Austroasiatic family, accounts for about 1.1 per cent. Santali, Mundari, Ho and Khasi belong to it, and Santali is the only one in the Eighth Schedule.
• (d)Dravidian — Dravidian is the genuine second place with 19.64 per cent — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, plus smaller languages such as Gondi, Tulu and Kurukh. A candidate who reads the question as which is the largest southern family will pick this.

The Census classifies mother tongues into families, and four of them account for almost everything: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. The Indo-Aryan branch descends from the same Indo-European stock as Persian, Greek and Latin and covers the north, west and east of the country; Dravidian is concentrated in the south with pockets such as Kurukh in central India and Brahui far to the north-west. The 2011 count also lists a tiny Kra-Dai presence and a residual category of other languages.

The shape of the answer is a heavy first place and a distant second, so the item is really testing whether you know that Hindi and Bengali belong to the same family. Where candidates go wrong is with the word Austric, which sounds archaic enough to be mistaken for something very old and therefore very large; it names a small family of tribal languages. It also helps to keep families apart from scripts and from the Eighth Schedule, which lists 22 languages by political recognition rather than by descent.

• Census 2011 records 945,333,910 Indo-European speakers, 78.07 per cent of the population, of whom the great majority speak Indo-Aryan languages.
• Dravidian speakers number 237,840,116, or 19.64 per cent.
• Austroasiatic (Austric) speakers number 13,493,080, about 1.11 per cent; Sino-Tibetan speakers 12,257,382, about 1.01 per cent.
• The Munda languages, including Santali, Mundari and Ho, belong to the Austroasiatic family.
• Together, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian account for more than 97 per cent of the population.

• Treating Austric as a large or ancient-and-therefore-dominant family; it is about one per cent of speakers.
• Equating the Eighth Schedule list with the family classification — the two answer different questions.
• Assuming Sino-Tibetan is large because it covers a wide stretch of the north-east; area and speaker numbers diverge sharply here.

As a single-line question on the largest family, or as a match-list pairing a named language such as Santali, Bodo or Kurukh with its family.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Santali language belongs to which one of the following language families?

  • (a)Indo-Aryan
  • (b)Dravidian
  • (c)Austroasiatic
  • (d)Sino-Tibetan

  Answer(c) Austroasiatic — Santali is a Munda language and the only one of that group in the Eighth Schedule.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is the second largest language family of India by number of speakers?

  • (a)Austroasiatic
  • (b)Dravidian
  • (c)Sino-Tibetan
  • (d)Kra-Dai

  Answer(b) Dravidian — about 19.64 per cent of the population in Census 2011, against roughly 78 per cent for Indo-Aryan.