To negotiate on the markets of Calcutta, better speak Bengali to get the best price. Bob Harris, English music presenter former host of the BBC2 music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test, and co-founder of the magazine Time Out.

There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined.' Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian.

'India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. With the first traces of civilisation dating more than 3,000 years back and given that three different empires ruled over the subcontinent for the last 600 years, one can only acknowledge the rich cultural past of India. If you dig a bit deeper into India's past, these figures will come to no surprise. The Marahati language spoken in Bombay, as well as the Tamil dialects and the important Urdu idiom are some of the main languages used in India. In total, 122 languages are spoken by at least 10,000 people while another 3o languages are spoken by more than 1 million people. The reason is simple, the Indian population speaks too many languages to only have one official language, even within the same state. Each state was given the possibility to choose amongst one of the 23 officially recognised languages and more often than not, a state has more than one official language. But this does not mean that every state of the Union uses these languages to conduct their official business. From then on, both Hindi and English became the official languages of the India government. Each of the members of the Assembly had to sign two copies of the document, one was in Hindi, the second was in English. The Constitution of India took almost three years to be drafted but eventually, on the 26th of January 1950, the first elected Constituent Assembly of India, agreed on it. Bengali is one of the officially recognised languages of the Union of India according to the Eight Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

Sanskrit alphabet with bengali alphabet