With its religious and racial diversity, India has more than 15000 separate languages and four major the language families. Of these four, the two largest are Indo- Aryan, in the same family as the languages of Europe, whose speakers live in northern and middle India, and Dravidian, languages of the southern region and unique to India. There are large numbers of local dialects. One of the many sublanguages of Indo-Aryan is Hindi, which was eventually intended to replace English as the national, or official, state language, following India’s political independence in 1947. However, controversy still surrounds this issue, primarily because it would require that 80 percent of the population learn a new language. Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic are the remaining two language groups. Language, then, is another prominent focal point for regional patriotism and, along with religions and tensions and those caused by the caste system, is an added threat to India’s political unity.