Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India in the context of "Official scripts of India"

Urdu (اُرْدُو) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also an official Eighth Schedule language in India, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India. It also has an official status in several Indian states.

Urdu and Hindi share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani language, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.

Indian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India has 22 officially recognised languages. Sahitya Akademi, India's highest literary body, also has 24 recognised literary languages.

The earliest works of Indian literature were orally transmitted. Sanskrit literature begins with the oral literature of the Rig Veda, a collection of literature dating to the period 1500–1200 BCE. The Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were subsequently codified and appeared towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Classical Sanskrit literature developed rapidly during the first few centuries of the first millennium BCE, as did the Pāli Canon and Tamil Sangam literature. Ancient Meitei appeared in the 1st century CE with sacred musical compositions like the Ougri, and heroic narratives like the Numit Kappa. In the medieval period, literature in Kannada and Telugu appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries, respectively. Later, literature in Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Odia, and Maithili appeared. Thereafter literature in various dialects of Hindi, Persian and Urdu began to appear as well. In 1913, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became India's first Nobel laureate in literature.

As of 2025, 22 languages have been classified as scheduled languages under the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India. There is no national language of India.

While the constitution was adopted in 1950, article 343 declared that Hindi would be the official language and English would serve as an additional official language for a period not exceeding 15 years. Article 344(1) defined a set of 14 regional languages which were represented in the Official Languages Commission. The commission was to suggest steps to be taken to progressively promote the use of Hindi as the official language of the country. The Official Languages Act, 1963, which came into effect on 26 January 1965, made provision for the continuation of English as an official language alongside Hindi.

Most of the languages of Bihar, the third most populous state of India, belong to the Bihari subgroup of the Indo-Aryan family. Chief among them are Bhojpuri, spoken in the west of the state, Maithili in the north, Magahi in center around capital Patna and in the south of the state. Maithili has official recognition under the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India. The official language of Bihar is Modern Standard Hindi, with Standard Urdu serving as a second official language in 15 districts. Bihari Hindi serves as the lingua franca of the region.

Exact speaker numbers for the main Bihari languages are not known because the more educated prefer to speak in Hindi (in formal situations) and so return this answer on the census, while many in rural areas and the urban poor, especially the illiterate, list their language as "Hindi" And "Urdu" on the census as they regard that as the term for their language.