A new study, the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, says that the official number of languages in India, 122, is far lower than the 780 that it counted and another 100 that its authors suspect exist.
The survey, which was conducted over the past four years by 3,000 volunteers and staff of the Bhasha Research & Publication Centre (“Bhasha” means “language” in Hindi), also concludes that 220 Indian languages have disappeared in the last 50 years, and that another 150 could vanish in the next half century as speakers die and their children fail to learn their ancestral tongues.
The 35,000-page survey was released on 5 Septeber 2013, to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of Indian philosopher Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, who was also the country’s second President.
Ganesh Devy, who supervised the project, said this is the first comprehensive survey of Indian languages that anyone has conducted since Irish linguistic scholar George Grierson noted the existence of 364 languages between 1894 and 1928.
There is a major reason for the disparity in the government’s number of languages versus what the survey found: the government does not count languages that fewer than 10,000 people speak. Devy and his volunteers, on the other hand, combed the country to find languages such as Chaimal in Tripura, which is today spoken by just four or five people.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project is Devy’s view of language as a marker of the well being of a community. Languages are being born and dying as they evolve–note how Old English is unintelligible today, and how different is Chaucer’s Middle English from ours–and that is a natural process. But bringing attention to Indian languages with small numbers of speakers, Devy said, is a way of bringing attention to the societies that speak them, along with the well being of their people.
The survey, which was conducted over the past four years by 3,000 volunteers and staff of the Bhasha Research & Publication Centre (“Bhasha” means “language” in Hindi), also concludes that 220 Indian languages have disappeared in the last 50 years, and that another 150 could vanish in the next half century as speakers die and their children fail to learn their ancestral tongues.
The 35,000-page survey was released on 5 Septeber 2013, to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of Indian philosopher Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, who was also the country’s second President.
Ganesh Devy, who supervised the project, said this is the first comprehensive survey of Indian languages that anyone has conducted since Irish linguistic scholar George Grierson noted the existence of 364 languages between 1894 and 1928.
There is a major reason for the disparity in the government’s number of languages versus what the survey found: the government does not count languages that fewer than 10,000 people speak. Devy and his volunteers, on the other hand, combed the country to find languages such as Chaimal in Tripura, which is today spoken by just four or five people.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project is Devy’s view of language as a marker of the well being of a community. Languages are being born and dying as they evolve–note how Old English is unintelligible today, and how different is Chaucer’s Middle English from ours–and that is a natural process. But bringing attention to Indian languages with small numbers of speakers, Devy said, is a way of bringing attention to the societies that speak them, along with the well being of their people.
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