The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues". According to the 1991 census, 22 'languages' had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114 had more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).[4]
The number of Sanskrit speakers in India in 1991 census was 49,736.[5]
Census was not conducted in Assam in the previous census in 1981 due to separatist movements that time. The census data for Assam was done based on interpolation.[9]
^ abVijayanunni, M. (26–29 August 1998). "Planning for the 2001 Census of India based on the 1991 Census"(PDF). 18th Population Census Conference. Honolulu, Hawaii, US: Association of National Census and Statistics Directors of America, Asia, and the Pacific. Archived from the original(PDF) on 19 November 2008. Retrieved 17 December 2014.
^Dev, Amiya (2010). "Literary Multilingualism II : Multilingualism in India". In Lisa Block de Behar; Paola Mildonian; Jean-Michel Djian; Djlel Kadir; Alfons Knauth; Dolores Romero Lopez; Marcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva (eds.). Comparative Literature : Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity(PDF). Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Vol. 2. pp. 172–183. Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, EOLSS Publishers, Paris, France, [1]. Retrieved 17 December 2014.
