Arrange the classical languages of India in an appropriate order as per their recognition.
(a) Telugu
(b) Sanskrit
(c) Pali
(d) Odia
(e) Tamil

Question

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Correct — option (4), '(e), (b), (a), (d), (c)' — that is, Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Odia, Pali. The Government of India has conferred classical language status in batches since 2004, and the five languages named in this question were declared in that order: Tamil was the first, declared a classical language in 2004. Sanskrit followed in 2005. Telugu came in 2008, together with Kannada, which is not among the options here. Odia was added in 2014. Pali came in the large batch of October 2024, when five languages were recognised at once — Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali — taking the total number of classical languages to eleven. Malayalam, declared in 2013, is the sixth language in the sequence and is likewise not offered here. One fact solves this question completely, and it is the fact almost every candidate has. Tamil was the first language to receive the status. Now look at the first entry in each option: option (1) begins with Odia, option (2) with Telugu, option (3) with Sanskrit, and only option (4) begins with Tamil. Nothing else needs checking. In a sequencing question, always test the options against the single item whose position you are most certain of — the first or the last — before attempting to reconstruct the whole chain, because the option list frequently disagrees on exactly that position. A second, independent check is available at the other end. Pali was recognised in 2024 and is the most recent of the five by a decade, so it must come last. Option (1) and option (4) both end with Pali; option (2) ends with Odia and option (3) ends with Pali as well. Combining the two anchors — Tamil first, Pali last — leaves only option (4).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This puts Odia first, ahead of Tamil and Sanskrit. Odia was recognised in 2014, a full decade after Tamil and nine years after Sanskrit, and was in fact the sixth language to receive the status. The rest of the sequence is also disturbed: Sanskrit is placed after Telugu, when Sanskrit was declared in 2005 and Telugu in 2008.  (b) Two clear errors. It opens with Telugu, recognised in 2008, ahead of Tamil, recognised in 2004; and it closes with Odia, recognised in 2014, after Pali, recognised in 2024. The option effectively inverts both ends of the sequence, which is why checking either the first or the last item disposes of it immediately.  (c) This is the near-miss, and the most instructive one. Its last two entries, Odia then Pali, are correct, and it is right that Sanskrit is very old — but the question asks for the order of official recognition, not the order of antiquity. Sanskrit is undoubtedly the more ancient language, yet Tamil received the classical designation first, in 2004, with Sanskrit following in 2005. The option is built precisely to catch a candidate who sorts by age of the language instead of by date of the government's declaration.

Concept: The classical language designation is a decision of the Union Government, taken on the advice of an expert committee, and it carries specific consequences rather than being purely honorific: awards for scholars distinguished in the language, provision for a centre of excellence for studies in it, and professorial chairs in central universities. The criteria settled when the category was created in 2004 were four — high antiquity of the earliest texts or recorded history over a period of a thousand years or more; a body of ancient literature regarded as a valuable heritage by generations of its speakers; a literary tradition that is original and not borrowed from another speech community; and the recognition that the classical language and its literature may be distinct from the modern language, so that a discontinuity between the classical form and its later offshoots is not a bar. The criteria were revised by a linguistic experts committee in 2024, before the batch of five languages recognised in October of that year.

State PCS 2026 Q98 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q98 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer