Hindi most spoken language in India, followed by Bengali and Marathi: Report

The number of people with Hindi as their mother tongue has increased and their percentage is up from 41.03 to 43.63 in 2001, according to data on language released as part of Census 2011.

Bengali has taken the second spot with 8.3 percent people listing Bengali as their mother tongue from 8.11 percent in the 2011 census, reports The Times of India.

Third on the list is Marathi, which replaced Telugu. Marathi speakers as a percentage of the population grew from 6.99 percent in 2001 to 7.09 percent in 2011. Those speaking Telugu as their mother tongue were down from 7.19 percent to 6.93 percent.

Urdu was ranked seventh, down from the sixth slot it occupied in 2001. Urdu speakers were down to 4.34 percent of the population compared to 5.01 percent in 2001. Gujarati, with 4.74 percent speakers, replaced Urdu in the sixth spot.

Unscheduled languages

Among the unscheduled languages, around 2.6 lakh people listed English as their first spoken language in the 2011 census, of which 1.06 lakh were in Maharashtra.

Tamil Nadu had the second highest number of people with English as their mother tongue, while Karnataka was a close third. Bhili/Bhilodi, spoken in Rajasthan, was the most spoken unscheduled language with 1.04 crore speakers, followed by Gondi with 29 lakh speakers.

Mother tongue defined

According to Census authorities, mother tongue is defined as the language spoken in childhood by the person's mother to the person or, where the mother has died in the person's infancy, the language mainly spoken in the person's household during childhood.

While 96.71 percent of the country's population returned one of the 22 scheduled languages as their mother tongue in the 2011 census, 3.29 percent returned other languages as their mother tongue.