Direction: A passage is given with question following it. Read the passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
If the census tells us that India has two or three hundred languages, it also tells us, I believe, that Germany has about fifty or sixty languages. I do not remember anyone pointing out this fact in proof of the disunity of disparity of Germany. As a matter of fact, a census mentions all manner of petty languages, sometimes spoken by a few thousand persons only; and often dialects are classed for scientific purposes as different languages. India seems to me to have surprisingly few languages, considering its are. Compared to the same area in Europe, it is far more closely allied in regard to language, but because of widespread illiteracy, common standards have not developed and dialects have formed. The principal languages of India are Hindustani (of the two varieties, Hindi and Urdu), English, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam and Kannada. If Assamese, Oriya, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Pushtu and Punjabi are added, the whole country is covered except for some hill and forest tribes. Of these, the Indo-Aryan languages, which cover the whole north, centre and west of India, are closely allied; and the southern Dravidian languages, though different, have been greatly influenced by Sanskrit, and are full of Sankskrit words. One of the reasons why there are many dialects in India is :