Some interesting language facts in LinuxUser & Developer this month:
India has 18 officially-recognised languages, and is believed to have 1652 mother tongues, of which 33 are spoken by over a hundred thousand people. Hindi has around 340 million speakers. Other languages like Bengali (70 million speakers), Assamese (13 million), Urdu (43 million), Punjabi (23 million), Telugu (66 million), Tamil (53 million), Marathi (62 million), Gujarati (40 million), Kannada (32 million), Malayalam (30 million) and Oriya (28 million) are also hugely important. Each of these languages has groups of speakers larger than the population of many a European country.
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