English Speakers Across India

I was intrigued by the article in The Times of India that stated that according to recently released data from the census conducted in India in 2001, India had over 86 million people who listed English as their second language and nearly 39 million who listed it as their third language.

I set out to verify these claims and found the necessary data on the official Census of India website. I wasn't expecting anything else apart from some fun crunching through the numbers and a verification of the numbers stated in the article. I was able to confirm that India had over 125 million language speakers in 2001. The Wikipedia article on the English language now reflects this data.

The interesting result of this analysis was the following graph:

Click graph to enlarge

I want to draw attention to two groups of languages:
Group A: Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati
Group B: Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya

English speakers whose primary language was one of those from Group A mainly identified English as a tertiary language while those whose primary language was one the Group B languages mainly identified English as their secondary language. The reason for this is not immediately apparent but becomes clearer when you dig through the census data.

The reason Group A users identified English as their tertiary language is that the overwhelming bulk of them identified Hindi as their secondary language.

The results are not surprising because the North-South divide over the adoption of Hindi has been the cause of countless debates but I had no idea that Bengali and Oriya would fall into the same group as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.

Maybe not surprising but interesting nonetheless.