One of the 19 states of India established on the basis of ethnicity, Andhra Pradesh ranks fifth by population (about 7% of Indians live here). Economically, it belongs to a group of regions with average wealth. It is located in the south of the Hindustan peninsula. Andhra Pradesh borders Orissa and Madhya Pradesh in the north, Maharashtra and Karnataka in the west, Tamil Nadu in the south. The capital is Hyderabad.
The dominant (titular) ethnic group is Telugu. The basis of ethnicity is the Telugu language, which has the status of an official regional language. Telugu is spoken by 84% of the state's population. The second most important language is Urdu, whose speakers comprise 8.6% of the population and profess Islam. Urdu has the status of an additional official language in those municipalities where its bearers are 15% or more of the population.
Although Andhra Pradesh was India's first linguistic state, the "gentlemen's agreement" on its creation (1956) did not fully take into account ethnic differences: Urdu-speaking Muslims were concentrated in Hyderabad and its surrounding districts, while Telugu-speaking Hindus resided in the ex-province of Andhra. Since the 1960s, the Urdu-speaking Muslims struggled for the division of the state and the creation of Telangana. It took several decades of confrontation, lengthy tripartite negotiations and agreements to establish the 29th state of Telangana out of ten predominantly Muslim and Urdu-speaking districts in February 2014.
