Sanskrit is one of the 22 official languages in India.[3] In 2010, Uttarakhand became the first state in India to have Sanskrit as its second official language.[4] In 2019, Himachal Pradesh became the second state to have Sanskrit as the second official language.[5] There are 2,360,821 total speakers of Sanskrit in India, as of 2011.[6] However, despite attempts at revival,[7][8] there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India.[7][9][10] In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue,[a] but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language.[7][11][12][13]
^ abcdSreevastan, Ajai (10 August 2014). "Where are the Sanskrit speakers?". The Hindu. Chennai. Retrieved 11 October 2020. Sanskrit is also the only scheduled language that shows wide fluctuations — rising from 6,106 speakers in 1981 to 49,736 in 1991 and then falling dramatically to 14,135 speakers in 2001. "This fluctuation is not necessarily an error of the Census method. People often switch language loyalties depending on the immediate political climate," says Prof. Ganesh Devy of the People's Linguistic Survey of India. ... Because some people "fictitiously" indicate Sanskrit as their mother tongue owing to its high prestige and Constitutional mandate, the Census captures the persisting memory of an ancient language that is no longer anyone's real mother tongue, says B. Mallikarjun of the Center for Classical Language. Hence, the numbers fluctuate in each Census. ... "Sanskrit has influence without presence," says Devy. "We all feel in some corner of the country, Sanskrit is spoken." But even in Karnataka's Mattur, which is often referred to as India's Sanskrit village, hardly a handful indicated Sanskrit as their mother tongue.
^Ruppel, A. M. (2017). The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit. Cambridge University Press. p. 2. ISBN978-1-107-08828-3. The study of any ancient (or dead) language is faced with one main challenge: ancient languages have no native speakers who could provide us with examples of simple everyday speech
^Annamalai, E. (2008). "Contexts of multilingualism". In Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru; S. N. Sridhar (eds.). Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. pp. 223–. ISBN978-1-139-46550-2. Some of the migrated languages ... such as Sanskrit and English, remained primarily as a second language, even though their native speakers were lost. Some native languages like the language of the Indus valley were lost with their speakers, while some linguistic communities shifted their language to one or other of the migrants' languages.
^McCartney, Patrick (May 10, 2020), Searching for Sanskrit Speakers in the Indian Census, The Wire, retrieved November 24, 2020 Quote: "What this data tells us is that it is very difficult to believe the notion that Jhiri is a “Sanskrit village” where everyone only speaks fluent Sanskrit at a mother tongue level. It is also difficult to accept that the lingua franca of the rural masses is Sanskrit, when most the majority of L1, L2 and L3 Sanskrit tokens are linked to urban areas. The predominance of Sanskrit across the Hindi belt also shows a particular cultural/geographic affection that does not spread equally across the rest of the country. In addition, the clustering with Hindi and English, in the majority of variations possible, also suggests that a certain class element is involved. Essentially, people who identify as speakers of Sanskrit appear to be urban and educated, which possibly implies that the affiliation with Sanskrit is related in some way to at least some sort of Indian, if not, Hindu, nationalism."
^McCartney, Patrick (May 11, 2020), The Myth of 'Sanskrit Villages' and the Realm of Soft Power, The Wire, retrieved November 24, 2020 Quote: "Consider the example of this faith-based development narrative that has evolved over the past decade in the state of Uttarakhand. In 2010, Sanskrit became the state's second official language. ... Recently, an updated policy has increased this top-down imposition of language shift, toward Sanskrit. The new policy aims to create a Sanskrit village in every “block” (administrative division) of Uttarakhand. The state of Uttarakhand consists of two divisions, 13 districts, 79 sub-districts and 97 blocks. ... There is hardly a Sanskrit village in even one block in Uttarakhand. The curious thing is that, while 70% of the state's total population live in rural areas, 100pc of the total 246 L1-Sanskrit tokens returned at the 2011 census are from Urban areas. No L1-Sanskrit token comes from any villager who identifies as an L1-Sanskrit speaker in Uttarakhand."
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