STATEMENT -  4
SCHEDULED LANGUAGES IN DESCENDING ORDER OF SPEAKERS' STRENGTH - 2001
S. No.	Language	Persons who returned the language as their mother tongue		Percentage to total population **
1	2	3		4
1	Hindi	422,048,642		41.03
2	Bengali	83,369,769		8.11
3	Telugu	74,002,856		7.19
4	Marathi	71,936,894		6.99
5	Tamil	60,793,814		5.91
6	Urdu	51,536,111		5.01
7	Gujarati	46,091,617		4.48
8	Kannada	37,924,011		3.69
9	Malayalam	33,066,392		3.21
10	Oriya	33,017,446		3.21
11	Punjabi	29,102,477		2.83
12	Assamese	13,168,484		1.28
13	Maithili	12,179,122		1.18
14	Santali	6,469,600		0.63
15	Kashmiri	5,527,698		0.54
16	Nepali	2,871,749		0.28
17	Sindhi	2,535,485		0.25
18	Konkani	2,489,015		0.24
19	Dogri	2,282,589		0.22
20	Manipuri *	1,466,705		0.14
21	Bodo	1,350,478		0.13
22	Sanskrit	14,135		N
*  Excludes figures of Paomata, Mao-Maram and Purul sub-divisions of Senapati district of Manipur for 2001.
** The percentage of speakers of each language for 2001 has been worked out on the total population of
India excluding the population of Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district of
Manipur due to cancellation of census results.
N - Stands for negligible.