The 1991 census of India was the 13th in a series of censuses held in India every decade since 1871.
[3] The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues".
According to the 1991 census, 22 languages had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114 had more than 10,000 native speakers.
The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).
[4] The number of Sanskrit speakers in India in 1991 census was 49,736.