Name: _ Date English III Reading Test Read the following text carefully: Languages in India India - a land as large as a sub-continent is bound to have many languages and the number of languages in India justifies its size There are 15 official languages and hundreds of local dialects Such a plethora of languages make an average Indian a linguist On an average, every Indian speaks two languages and in cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore people can speak up to three languages Indian languages are grouped under two families - Dravidian and Indo-European All the south Indian languages are grouped under Dravidian family Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are spoken in the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka respectively The languages are different but resemble in having rounded alphabets They have many Sanskrit words in their vocabulary, but their grammar is entirely different On the other hand Hindi, the language spoken all over north India and in some parts of east India, belongs to the Indo European family of languages It has evolved from various transitional forms of Sanskrit over a long period of time Being the national language it is widely spoken all over India, but it is more prominent in the northern parts of the country Other languages like Punjabi, Gujarati, Garhwali, etc are modified forms of Hindi, which have evolved by the mixing of the local dialects Apart from the widely spoken Indo-European and Dravidian languages there are lesser-spoken Mon-Khmer and Sino-Tibetan languages, which account for 2% of the total population These are mostly spoken in the Northeastern India One will be surprised to see so many languages existing together More surprising are the common factors in these languages Many languages not only share vocabulary with each other but also share the script Hindi and Marathi (spoken in Maharashtra) have a common script Bengali and Assamese too share a common script All the Indian languages are written left to right except those written in Persian scripts (Urdu & Kashmiri) Source: http://www.indian-travel-tours.com/religion-language.html Write whether the following statements are true or false Hindi is spoken all over north India and in some parts of east India _ According to the text, there are 15 language families in India. The author argues that there are several common factors in these languages like vocabulary and script That means that all Indian languages are derived from Hindi On an average, Indian people speak two or three languages _ Dravidian and Indo-European are the most spoken languages in India _ Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Assamese have a common script. Hindi belongs to Indo European family of languages That means that Hindi has been influenced by European languages like Italic and Germanic languages