Country Languages Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The language is Rajasthani.

Sahitya Akademi recognises 24 languages for its awards and programmes: the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule plus English and Rajasthani. Rajasthani is not in the Eighth Schedule.

Nepali, Konkani and Sindhi are all in the Eighth Schedule, so they do not fit the question.

The Eighth Schedule now lists 22 languages; Konkani and Nepali were added in 1992 by the 71st Amendment and Sindhi in 1967 by the 21st.

Answer: D

The most recent inclusion among these is Dogri.

The Constitution (Ninety-second Amendment) Act, 2003, which came into force in January 2004, added four languages to the Eighth Schedule: Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali. That brought the total to 22 languages.

Kashmiri has been in the Schedule since the Constitution came into force in 1950. Angika and Bhojpuri are not yet in the Eighth Schedule, despite long-standing demands for their inclusion.

Answer: A

The correct matching is (a)-(ii), (b)-(i), (c)-(v), (d)-(vi), (e)-(iv), (f)-(iii).

• Malayalam: Kerala
• Konkani: Goa
• Marathi: Maharashtra
• Gujarati: Gujarat
• Kannada: Karnataka
• Kuduk (Kurukh): Jharkhand, spoken by the Oraon community

The other options pair Malayalam with Goa or Konkani with Kerala, and the second and fourth also send Marathi to Jharkhand and Kuduk to Maharashtra or Gujarat, which is wrong.

Answer: C

It is Honduras.

Spanish is the official language. Garifuna, Miskito and other indigenous languages are spoken along the Caribbean coast.

Answer: C

It is Kosovo.

Albanian and Serbian are both official languages, with Turkish, Bosnian and Romani given official status at municipal level where their speakers are concentrated.

Answer: B

It is Serbia.

Serbian is official in Serbia and is unusual in being written in both Cyrillic and Latin, with full digraphia - every speaker reads both, and the two scripts map onto each other letter for letter.

Answer: C

It is Turkey.

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and, with Greek, of Cyprus. The alphabet was changed from Arabic to Latin in 1928 as part of Ataturk's reforms.

Answer: D

It is the Czech Republic.

Czech is a West Slavic language, very close to Slovak, written in the Latin alphabet with the hacek and the acute accent - diacritics introduced by Jan Hus in the fifteenth century.

Answer: A

It is Hindi.

Article 343 makes Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the Union, with English continuing as an additional official language. The Eighth Schedule recognises 22 languages, and the states have official languages of their own.

Answer: A

It is Uzbek.

Uzbek is a Turkic language and the state language of Uzbekistan, written in a Latin alphabet since independence though Cyrillic remains in common use. Russian is widely spoken in the cities.