As per a recent (2018) analysis of the 2011 Census of India, while there are 19,569 languages or dialects that are spoken as Mother Tongue in India, only 121 of these are spoken by 10,000 or more people. Of these, the Indian constitution gives special recognition to 22 languages which is the mother tongue of 96.71% of the population of the country.
In this post, I've recreated a thematic GIS Application called Languages of India using tutorial instructions posted on Learn ArcGIS. The application can be accessed from this link.
(May 2023 update - my link has expired and the project has become inaccessible. However, the same application has been recreated by another user and you may access it here).
The features and design of the Application are discussed in this post-
The central feature on the landing page of the GIS Application is the District Map of India symbolized by the dominant mother tongue used in a particular district with a visual indicator (shade) indicating the percentage of population who use that mother tongue.
On the right are the bookmarks which redirect to custom Map-views of where the individual special recognition languages (all except Sanskrit) are dominant. For example, in Figure 2 below, you can see the custom Map-view of the Bengali language-
The denser the shade, the greater the percentage of native speakers (Bengali, in this case) in the population of that district. As can be observed, much of the state of West Bengal is represented by a deep blue shade signalling that this is a Bengali heartland. In comparison, while some of the northeastern states do have native Bengali-speakers, they do not form a large percentage of the overall population of that district - as a result, the symbolization there is in pale-blue shade.
The GIS Application is dynamic - more information is revealed by toggling the features. For example, clicking on any district opens a Pop-up window (refer Figure 3 below) which depicts information about the population mother-tongue classification of that district. This helps the user to obtain more perspective about the population composition - whether it is cosmopolitan or traditional, for example.
Besides the Languages of India tab at the top of the application lies the Language Density tab. Clicking on it will lead you to this view-
This District Map of India to me is the perfect representation of the diverse cultural heritage of India. As you'll discern from the Legend bar just below the tab, this Map depicts how many languages are spoken as Mother Tongue in a particular district. The symbology goes from pale yellow to dark red where the former indicates that only 1 language is spoken as mother tongue in that district whereas the latter indicates that 30 or more languages are being spoken as mother tongue in that district!
To the left in Figure 4 above, you can see List Cards which contain Fact Snippets about the Languages of India. Clicking on any one of them will dynamically lead you to the particular region on the map which the List Card is referring to-
I was amazed to know that Dimapur district in the far-flung northeastern state of Nagaland is is the most diverse in the country - 44 Mother Tongues are being spoken by its population! This is the inherent utility of such GIS Applications - there are plenty of insights that can be unearthed by exploring the geospatial dataset and it often breaks stereotypes and question one' assumptions. For example, I was surprised to know that Dungarpur district on the southern edge of the western state of Rajasthan has a large Punjabi-speaking population (21%) - I had assumed that Punjabi-speakers occupied a dominant portion of the population in just the northern states of the country.
Do try experiencing the Languages of India GIS Application - conveying information through Maps has never been so effective! I have used Esri's ArcGIS Experience Builder to create this Application. You can view it across devices - Television, Desktop, iPads, Tablets and Mobile Phones.
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