(a) Odia (Odiya) language on 20 February 2014 became the sixth language of the country to get classical language' status after the Union Cabinet approved it. Odia is billed as the first language from the Indo-Aryan linguistic group and the case for making it a classical language was also premised on the fact that it has no resemblance to Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali and Telugu. With this, Odia came into the same league as Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, which have already been conferred the classical language status.
