Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers in India

Move tables to a subpage?
Given how often IPs and newish users seem to like fiddling with the numbers in the tables, and how wearisome it is to check every time whether they are correcting an error or introducing one (it's almost always the latter), I believe we should think about some sort of page protection. I don't like the idea of protecting the whole articles as there are prose sections that could do with expansion and elaboration, so maybe protect only the tables? This would involve moving them to a well-protected subpage or template and transcluding from there. – Uanfala (talk) 21:27, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Numbers, numbers
I've been thinking of fully updating the tables in the article using the results of the 2011 census. Once this is done, my plan is to lock them all up in subpages (as suggested in the previous thread) so that people stop tampering with the numbers. But I guess at this stage it would be appropriate to decide how much data we need in those tables. Currently, the main table of languages in the article lists the numbers from the three censuses since 1991, and if we wanted to, we could easily include the 1981 and 1971 censuses. But how much historical data do we want to have? I sometimes feel like even having the 1991 ones is a bit over the top. Any thoughts?

Also, I really dislike the way those tables currently give these exact numbers, up to the last unit, far more exact than would be allowed by the error margin. Shouldn't we round them all, using for example sigfig? How many digits would count as significant? – Uanfala (talk) 22:03, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Census results by district and subdistricts
C-16 Population By Mother Tongue--Kaiyr (talk) 05:29, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Reorganise?
As you're all aware, the census uses two categories – "mother tongue", which is the language reported by individuals during the census, and "language", which is the result of census officials grouping together different "mother tongues". Though both are worth listing in the article, one is seen as more relevant and given more prominence. Which one should that be? Currently, that's the "language" category. At times it's useful because it groups related dialects together, but at other times – notably for Hindi – it lumps together large swathes of only distantly related languages under a single label. These "languages" are then mostly artefacts of the census's peculiar classification, and don't always have any basis in linguistic reality. Shouldn't we then try to build the article around the "mother tongue" category? This isn't going to make a big difference to the population figures beyond Hindi – for the majority of "languages", almost all of the numbers come from the eponymous "mother tongue", with typically only a small contribution by other "mother tongues" grouped with it. – Uanfala (talk) 14:09, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I am guessing that people who come here will want to see the languages chart first. The question I expect to be asked is "How many people speak X?" Or they will be just browsing. Also there are 3 charts: "First, Second, and Third languages by number of speakers in India", "Population ordered by number of native speakers" and "Mother tongues". But, you know, if you want to just try it, as I am concerned, go ahead and be bold. Or perhaps you could make a copy in you sandbox, just to see how it is. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 06:32, 21 October 2020 (UTC)