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The Constitution of India designates a bilingual approach for official language of the Government of India employing usage of Hindi written in the Devanagari script, as well as English.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Constitutional Provisions: Official Language Related Part-17 of The Constitution Of India )〕 Hindi and English find everyday use for important official purposes such as parliamentary proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and a State Government.〔 States within India have the liberty and powers to specify their own official language(s) through legislation and therefore there are more than 20 officially recognized languages in India, including Assamese, English,Sindhi, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, Bengali, Odia, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu etc. The number of native Hindi speakers range between 14.5 to 24.5% in total Indian population, however, other dialects of Hindi termed as Hindi languages are spoken by nearly 45% of Indians, mostly accounted from the states falling under the Hindi belt. Other Indian languages are each spoken by around 10% or less of the population.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Scheduled Languages in descending order of speaker's strength - 2001 )〕 States specify their own official language(s) through legislation. The section of the Constitution of India dealing with official languages therefore includes detailed provisions which deal not just with the languages used for the official purposes of the union, but also with the languages that are to be used for the official purposes of each state and union territory in the country, and the languages that are to be used for communication between the union and the states ''inter se''. During the British Raj, English was used for purposes at the federal level. The Indian constitution adopted in 1950 envisaged that Hindi would be gradually phased in to replace English over a fifteen-year period, but gave Parliament the power to, by law, provide for the continued use of English even thereafter.〔(Kanchan Chandra, "Ethnic Bargains, Group Instability, and Social Choice Theory," Politics and Society 29, 3: 337-62. )〕 Plans to make Hindi the sole official language of the Republic met with resistance in some parts of the country. Hindi continues to be used today, in combination with other (at the central level and in some states) State official languages at the state level. The legal framework governing the use of languages for official purpose currently includes the Constitution, the Official Languages Act, 1963, Official Languages (Use for Official Purpose of the Union) Rules, 1976, and various state laws, as well as rules and regulations made by the central government and the states. ==Official languages of the Union== The Indian constitution, in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union. Unless Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into effect, i.e., on 26 January 1965. The prospect of the changeover, however, led to much alarm in the non Hindi-speaking areas of India, especially Dravidian-speaking states whose languages were not related to Hindi at all. As a result, Parliament enacted the Official Languages Act, 1963, 〔(Commissioner Linguistic Minorities ) 〕〔(Language in India )〕〔(THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGES ACT, 1963 ) 〕〔(National Portal of India: Know India: Profile ) 〕〔(Committee of Parliament on Official Language report )〕 which provided for the continued use of English for official purposes along with Hindi, even after 1965. In late 1964, an attempt was made to expressly provide for an end to the use of English, but it was met with protests from states such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal, Karnataka, Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh. Some of these protests also turned violent.〔Hardgrave, Robert L. (August 1965). "The Riots in Tamilnadu: Problems and Prospects of India's Language Crisis". Asian Survey (University of California Press)〕 As a result, the proposal was dropped, and the Act itself was amended in 1967 to provide that the use of English would not be ended until a resolution to that effect was passed by the legislature of every state that had not adopted Hindi as its official language, and by each house of the Indian Parliament. The current position is thus that the Union government continues to use English in addition to Hindi for its official purposes as a "subsidiary official language,"〔(Notification No. 2/8/60-O.L. (Ministry of Home Affairs), dated 27 April 1960 )〕 but is also required to prepare and execute a programme to progressively increase its use of Hindi. The exact extent to which, and the areas in which, the Union government uses Hindi and English, respectively, is determined by the provisions of the Constitution, the Official Languages Act, 1963, the Official Languages Rules, 1976, and statutory instruments made by the Department of Official Language under these laws. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Languages with official status in India」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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