The Linguistic census data released recently, India had shown 51,728 people whose mother tongue was Arabic in 2001, a little over 18,000 of them living in Bihar and just under 8,500 living in Uttar Pradesh. There were nine other states with at least 1,000 Arabic-speaking people.
There are close to 12,000 people whose mother tongue is Persian. The number of Persian speakers is highest in West Bengal, followed by Jharkhand, Maharastra and Bihar.
The size of the Tibetan diaspora in India is estimated at anything between 120,000 and 200,000. However, only 85,000 people reported Tibetan as their mother tongue in the 2001 census.
The fact that almost 2.3 lakh Indians reported English as their mother tongue corresponds fairly well with the estimated size of the Anglo-Indian community.Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and West Bengal, have the largest number of people with English as their mother tongue also seems to suggest that these are mainly Anglo-Indians.
Another language of foreign origin that has struck some roots in India is Afghani, Pushto, Kabuli. At the 2001 count, there were about 11,000 native speakers of this language in India.
The overwhelming bulk of this linguistic group — about 7,400 of them — lived in Jammu and Kashmir,Delhi being the only other state or union territory with more than a thousand.
14,000 people claimed Sanskrit as their mother tongue. About half of them were from Uttar Pradesh, while Andhra Pradesh was the only other state with over a thousand native Sanskrit speakers.
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