Whose Language Is the State’s Language? Linguistic Federalism Beyond Centre vs State

A language can unite a State and divide it at the same time.

That is the paradox at the heart of India’s language question. A State may legitimately want its regional language to play the central role in administration, education and public life. But the same State may contain millions of people for whom that language is not their mother tongue. Migration makes the boundaries even less clear. A language that is regional at the national level can therefore become dominant within a State — and a minority language within that same State.

This changes the question.

The language debate is usually framed as a contest between the Centre and the States: Hindi versus Tamil, Hindi versus Malayalam, or a national three-language framework versus State-level language policies. But that captures only one layer of India’s linguistic federalism.

The harder question is what happens inside the State.

A State is rarely linguistically homogeneous

India’s States were never perfect linguistic containers. The reorganisation of States around linguistic identities created broad regional majorities, but it did not eliminate linguistic minorities.

Migration has made this even more significant. The 2011 Census recorded about 26% of Indians as bilingual and 7% as trilingual. In urban areas, the corresponding figures were 44% and 15%. These figures come from the Census’s official bilingualism and trilingualism tables and describe the linguistic situation recorded in 2011, not a current 2026 measurement.

Language policy, in other words, is not implemented on an empty map.

A State government may be governing in Malayalam, Tamil or Kannada, while the people living under it speak several languages at home, work across linguistic communities and educate their children in different languages. The old idea of a linguistic State therefore contains a quiet contradiction: the State may have one dominant language without having only one language.

That is where linguistic federalism becomes more complicated than Centre versus State.

The national debate has always contained two different questions

The first concerns the Union’s language policy.

The Constitution makes Hindi the official language of the Union, while the Official Languages Act, 1963 provides for the continued use of English alongside Hindi for specified Union purposes, including communications with States that have not adopted Hindi as their official language. A State legislature may adopt one or more languages in use in the State, or Hindi, for its official purposes.

The second question concerns education.

The three-language formula emerged from the education policy framework of 1968, while Tamil Nadu subsequently retained its two-language approach of Tamil and English in government schools. The National Education Policy 2020 continued with a three-language framework but stated that no language should be imposed on any State and that the languages would be chosen by States, regions and students, subject to the requirement that at least two be native to India.

That distinction matters.

The formal design of a policy and the way that policy is experienced on the ground are not necessarily the same thing. A language may not be constitutionally or formally imposed and yet become practically significant because of the way schools, examinations, administration or public institutions operate.

The federal question therefore lies partly in the distance between formal choice and practical pressure.

The real federal question is not who gets to promote a language

States have strong reasons to promote their regional languages.

A regional language is not merely a communication tool. It can be the language of administration, literature, public institutions, schooling and political identity. Weakening it can therefore be perceived as weakening the cultural basis of the State itself.

But promotion creates a second responsibility.

If Malayalam becomes the principal language of public administration in Kerala, what happens to a Tamil-speaking resident who needs to communicate with a State department? If a Kannada-speaking child lives in a Malayalam-speaking part of Kerala, should learning Malayalam become a barrier to schooling? If migration changes the linguistic composition of a city, should the State’s language policy change with it?

The answer cannot simply be to choose between the majority language and minority languages. The institutional challenge is to make the majority language capable of governing without making minority citizens linguistically invisible.

That is the deeper meaning of accommodation.

Kerala offers a different way to see the problem

The Malayalam Language Bill, 2025, brings this internal dimension of linguistic federalism into focus. Kerala Legislative Assembly records show that the Bill was formally considered as part of legislative business and referred to the relevant Subject Committee in October 2025. That establishes its legislative consideration; it does not, by itself, establish that all of its proposed provisions subsequently became law.

The proposal seeks to strengthen Malayalam as the official language of Kerala and expand its use across public life. It also addresses education and the promotion of Malayalam in areas extending from the judiciary to information technology.

But the federal significance of the proposal lies not only in what it does for Malayalam. It also deals with citizens who do not speak Malayalam as their mother tongue.

The provisions concerning Tamil and Kannada linguistic minorities are particularly important. In notified areas, members of these communities may correspond with specified State authorities in their respective languages, with replies provided in those languages. The proposal also provides room for students whose mother tongue is not Malayalam to pursue education in other available languages in State schools. Students from other States or foreign countries whose mother tongue is not Malayalam are exempted from Malayalam examinations at specified school levels.

The result is an institutional model in which language promotion and linguistic accommodation are treated as simultaneous responsibilities.

That is important because linguistic federalism need not mean choosing between a State’s linguistic identity and the rights of people who do not belong to its linguistic majority.

Migration changes the meaning of a linguistic State

The larger difficulty is that linguistic geography does not remain fixed.

People move for education, employment, business and family. Urban economies bring together workers from different parts of the country. A State may therefore become more linguistically diverse even while its official language remains unchanged.

The 2011 Census figures on bilingualism and trilingualism point in this direction, with considerably higher proportions in urban India than rural India.

This creates a second-order problem for language policy. A framework designed around relatively stable linguistic communities may become less adequate when the communities themselves become more mobile.

Linguistic federalism cannot be frozen at the moment when States were reorganised. It has to respond to the movement of people within those boundaries.

This also explains why language policy cannot be judged only by asking whether a State has the right to promote its own language. That right answers the question of cultural autonomy. It does not answer the question of equal access for citizens who speak something else.

Tamil Nadu illustrates the other side of the bargain

Tamil Nadu’s two-language policy represents a different federal position.

The State has consistently retained Tamil and English in its government schools rather than adopting the three-language approach. The policy has deep historical roots, while the Union’s education framework has continued to favour a broader multilingual model.

The disagreement therefore contains two legitimate policy objectives that do not automatically produce the same institutional choice.

One is linguistic autonomy: allowing States to shape education around their own linguistic and social circumstances. The other is multilingual capability: encouraging students to learn additional Indian languages in a country where mobility across linguistic regions is increasing.

The evidence does not establish that one language model necessarily produces superior educational outcomes. In fact, the same education evidence highlights a more basic problem: learning outcomes remain weak, while government schools operate under resource constraints.

That creates an important policy distinction. The question is not merely how many languages should a child learn? It is also what can the education system realistically teach well, and for what purpose?

A language policy that expands the number of languages formally taught without ensuring meaningful proficiency may satisfy a policy objective on paper without necessarily producing multilingual capability in practice.

Federalism therefore works in two directions

This is where the usual Centre-State framing becomes incomplete.

Federalism protects States from excessive uniformity imposed from above. But it also requires States to govern people who are not culturally or linguistically identical to the majority within the State.

The first principle protects regional autonomy; the second protects internal diversity. Neither can simply cancel the other.

A State that cannot protect its regional language risks losing an important dimension of its cultural autonomy. But a State that treats its regional language as the only language that matters risks turning federal diversity into a new form of internal majoritarianism.

The Kerala example makes this tension concrete. Its language policy can simultaneously strengthen Malayalam and recognise the administrative and educational needs of Tamil- and Kannada-speaking minorities.

That is not simply a compromise between two opposing sides. It is a different understanding of what the State itself is.

The deeper shift: from language dominance to language accommodation

The old language debate asks:

Which language should prevail?

A more useful federal question is:

How can multiple languages function within the same political space without making any community feel excluded?

That requires institutions capable of accommodation.

Administrative correspondence may need multilingual access in areas with concentrated minorities. Schools may need flexibility for children whose mother tongue differs from the State language. Public institutions must remain accessible to citizens who move across State borders. National language policy, meanwhile, has to recognise that the same citizen may belong simultaneously to several linguistic worlds.

This is why migration matters so much. When people remain within one linguistic region for generations, language policy can be organised largely around the dominant community. When people move continuously across State boundaries, the distinction between “regional” and “minority” becomes less permanent.

Today’s majority language speaker may be tomorrow’s minority-language speaker elsewhere.

Federalism therefore creates a reciprocal obligation: the language protections a State demands for its own people outside its borders should inform how it treats linguistic minorities within its borders.

That is the part of the language debate that is easiest to miss.

The State’s language cannot become the State’s boundary

India’s linguistic federalism was built on the recognition that language matters politically.

But language was never the only fact about a citizen.

People belong to States without necessarily belonging to the linguistic majority of those States. They migrate, marry across linguistic communities, work in different regions and raise children in multilingual households.

The constitutional and federal challenge is therefore not to eliminate linguistic identities. It is to prevent those identities from becoming barriers to equal participation.

The Kerala language debate points toward a larger principle: a State can promote its own language while creating institutional space for those who speak another.

A strong linguistic State is not one in which everyone speaks the same language. It is one in which the regional language can flourish without requiring linguistic minorities to disappear.

That is what takes the language debate beyond Centre versus State — and turns it into a question about how a diverse federation learns to govern diversity within itself.