The Indian subcontinent has four major language families, e.g., Indo-Aryan,
Dravidian, Austroasiatic (Munda ) and Tibeto-Burman. These language families
have co-existed together for many centuries and have resulted in widespread
multilingualism. The multiplicity of languages does not impede communication as
large populations habitually learn more than one language for daily communicative
needs. With the increase in the movement of people in recent years for business, travel
and educational needs, there is an urgent demand to teach and learn more languages.
India, with more than 22 major official languages, requires the use of multilingual
dictionaries. It will help in translation work that would be required at a large scale.
With the help of modern technology it is now possible to make use of multilingual
dictionaries for many purposes in daily life as we make use of the spoken knowledge of
different languages in our daily life. The present paper will attempt to provide some
facets of multilingualism in India and the need for multilingual dictionaries.
