Indian Languages

Barring the North East, India is inhabited by a large population who speak languages belonging to three major families :

• Indo Aryan (a sub family of Indo European) represented by Hindi, Marathi, Bangla, Oriya, Gujarati, Maithili, etc.
• Dravidian : Tamil, Telgu, Malayalam, Kannada, etc.
• Munda : Sora, Santhali, Malto, Kharia, etc.

Co-existence over time has resulted in large scale diffusion of linguistic features across genetic boundries resulting in an Indo-Aryanization of Dravidian languages and Dravidianization of Indo-Aryan languages. Significant borrowings of linguistic features from Munda into the other two families nd vice-versa are also evident.

Most of the languages of India, of no matter which major family, have a set of retroflexes, in contrast with dentals. The retroflexes includes stops, nasals, fricatives, laterals, trills and flaps. This is an essentially Dravidian feature which has crept into all Indo-Aryan and Munda languages marked by Barushaski in Kashmir.