The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, proposes to conduct a linguistic survey across the country to create a ‘Language Atlas’ of India.
It aims to enumerate how many languages are spoken and in which States and regions, can provide the answer.
The IGNCA is an autonomous body under the Union Culture Ministry.
India recognises 22 languages officially, which are part of Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution.
According to Census data, 97 % of the Indian population speaks one of these languages.
There are an additional 99 non-scheduled languages included in the Census, and according to the 2011 Census.
Around 37.8 million people identify one of these non-Scheduled languages as their mother tongue.
The native language of 1.2 million people remains unaccounted for due to the decision to not include languages with less than 10,000 speakers in the Census since 1971.
The 1961 Census of India recorded 1,554 languages spoken in India.