Hindi, Bengali speakers India’s least multilingual groups

India’s largest linguistic groups — Hindi and Bengali speakers — are also the least multilingual. They have the smallest share of people who know even one more language. Among the scheduled languages that have more than 15 million speakers each, those who speak Urdu as their mother tongue are the most multilingual with 62% knowing one more language, typically Hindi.
Punjabis are the next most multilingual with 53% knowing two languages.Recently released Census 2011 data shows that for 87% of bilingual Punjabis, Hindi was the other language they knew and for 11% it was English. Punjabi speakers also accounted for the largest proportion of people speaking three languages among the scheduled languages. Of the trilingual Punjabis, 82% knew English and about 17% knew Hindi.
In the third largest linguistic group, of over 83 million Marathi speakers, 47% of them speak one more language. For most (88%) of these, Hindi was the second language they knew.

Among the 520 million Hindi speakers, only 12% were bilingual, the largest chunk among them being the 32 million who knew English. This was followed by 60.5 lakh who knew Marathi, an indication of the migration from the north to Maharashtra. Of the 79 lakh Hindi speakers who were trilingual, English was the third language for 32 lakh.
Among 97 million Bengali speakers, just 18%, or 17 million, were bilingual, nearly half of this lot also knowing Hindi.
In the south, the proportion of those who knew a language other than their mother tongue was the same in most states and at a relatively low level. The proportion ranged from 27% among Kannada and Malayalam speakers to 25% among Tamil and Telugu speakers. Interestingly, unlike in the north where the second language known was mostly Hindi, in the south there were much larger numbers for whom English was the second language.
Not surprisingly, smaller language groups tend to be more multilingual. This was true both within the 22 scheduled languages — where for instance 82% of Konkani speakers and 79% of Sindhi speakers knew another language — and even more so for non-scheduled languages. The best example of this was the 11,574 Lahauli speakers of whom 88% knew one more language, mostly Hindi, and 41% were trilingual.