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Which Indian languages are close relatives, which are not related at all, and what that means for a learner.
India's languages fall into two large families that are not related to each other, and knowing which is which predicts how hard your next one will be.
The Indo-Aryan family — Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, Odia, Assamese, Sindhi, Urdu — descends from Sanskrit through Prakrit. They share grammar, a great deal of vocabulary, and in several cases a script ancestor. A Marathi or Nepali speaker reads Devanagari already. A Bengali speaker recognises the script's logic and much of the formal vocabulary.
The Dravidian family — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam — is a separate family entirely, older in the subcontinent and unrelated to Sanskrit by descent. And yet a Tamil speaker finds Hindi sentence structure familiar, because millennia of contact left both with verb-final order and postpositions. Tamil also shares a large layer of Sanskrit loanwords in formal registers.
Sanskrit itself is not a modern spoken language and is not a shortcut to Hindi, though it explains a lot of vocabulary once you have some.
Nobody speaks 'Indian'. Hindi is the most widely understood single language across the north and centre, and in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and parts of the north-east it will get you much less far than English.
Reading gets you the grammar. Speaking is the part that only happens with another human. EkGuru tutors are native Hindi speakers in India who teach one to one over video — no group classes, no subscription.
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