Linguistic Survey of India: articles about
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A backgrounder to the survey
Nikita Mohta’s summation
Nikita Mohta, April 18, 2025: The Indian Express
South Asia, home to 25% of the global population, is characterised by the widespread use of five major language families: Indo-European, Iranian, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic/Munda. According to linguists, including Javed Majeed, a professor at King’s College London, distinguishing languages from dialects in South Asia is an intense and often impossible task, further complicating the process of determining the number of languages spoken in the region.
This challenge captivated Irish-born Indian Civil Services officer George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941) to embark on the monumental task of producing the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a project that spanned over three decades. Published in 21 volumes between 1901 and 1928, the survey aimed to document the linguistic diversity of India. Amid ongoing debates on multilingualism, Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India remains a foundational work, offering insight into the region’s diverse linguistic landscape.
Mother tongue versus the ‘polite language’
Grierson was born in Ireland in 1851 and later studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1871, he passed the Indian Civil Service exams and was posted to the Bengal Presidency. During his time in India, Grierson took up the study of Sanskrit and Hindustani (as it was called then). He also authored works on a wide range of subjects, including Bihari language and literature, and compiled a dictionary of the ‘Kashmiri Language’.
In an article for The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s English-language daily, Majeed suggests that the idea for the LSI may have been proposed to Grierson by his tutor, Robert Atkinson, professor of Oriental Languages at Trinity College. Grierson later presented the idea at the Vienna Congress of Orientalists in 1886. There, he referenced two of his works — Bihar Peasant Life (1885) and Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihari Language (1883-1887) — to reveal the contrast between the ‘polite’ or government language, Hindi/Hindustani, and the ‘mother tongue’ spoken by the people of Bihar.
In his 2019 work, Colonialism & Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, Majeed argues that Grierson had a “fluctuating sense” of the aims of the LSI. In an interview with indianexpress.com, Majeed said: “Generally, the LSI aimed to institutionalise knowledge of India as a linguistic region globally among linguists and academics while also increasing the colonial district officials’ understanding of dialects and languages in their own provinces and districts.”
Grierson emphasised the practical benefits of the Survey for magistrates, who needed to converse with witnesses in their local dialects rather than the court language, which was often alien to many villagers. He suggested that questioning witnesses in their languages could make it easier to get at the truth, unlike using Urdu or Hindi.
The LSI had three stages. In the first, Grierson compiled “a list of all the varieties of speech then known to exist in the area under survey,” sending forms to district officers and agents to gather information on languages and their estimated speakers. In the second stage, officers collected specimens of each listed dialect and language. Specimens included the parable of the Prodigal Son (a biblical reference), folklore, and common words in India, which district administrators had to translate into “every known dialect and sub-dialect.” Majeed notes that specimens began arriving in 1897, with most received by 1900, and editing began in 1898. In the third stage, dialects and languages were grouped into families and subfamilies, requiring the adoption of theories about their relationships.
A colonial project?
The 21 volumes of Grierson’s LSI are, as Majeed describes in his other work Nation And Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey Of India (2019), “One of the most complete sources on South Asian languages.” It documents more than 700 linguistic varieties across South Asia, offering detailed lexical and grammatical data for 268 varieties within the four major South Asian language families. The survey remains a foundational reference for any discussion and nearly all subsequent studies on India’s linguistic landscape.
The complexities of conducting such an extensive survey, however, are difficult to grasp fully. In addition to managing large-scale data collection, collation, and analysis, Grierson had to navigate a difficult bureaucracy. While Majeed acknowledges that the LSI was not solely a product of the colonial state, Grierson could not have undertaken such a project without its backing.
Yet, the LSI’s departmental affiliation was often unclear, as various departments evolved throughout the survey. At different points, Grierson reported to the Home Department, the Education Department, or the Department of Education, Health, and Lands. Some officials viewed the data collection process as an unnecessary burden, leading Grierson to rely on personal contacts to obtain information from district commissioners while also negotiating with the princely states. For example, he was able to obtain a specimen of the Prodigal Son parable in Sarada script (widely used in Kashmir and surrounding areas at the time) only by appealing to the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir.
The Survey’s finances were also uncertain. In 1890, Grierson estimated the cost at Rs 3.5 lakh, based on provincial governments’ projections. By 1895, the Indian government allocated only Rs 2,000 annually for three years. In the end, no special funds were provided, apart from printing costs and one clerk. Thus, the LSI was not heavily reliant on colonial state finances, serving mainly to support the Census and provide a reference to the British government for identifying languages and dialects. “LSI was thus what Grierson continually called demi-official because he didn’t really get enough support from the state,” Majeed commented.
Defining the indefinite
A significant challenge faced by Grierson was the multiplicity of languages. In Nation & Region, Majeed notes that for the 1901 census, Grierson highlighted that “the same language may be called by many names in different localities, and there is always the risk of a variety of nomenclature leading to wrong classification.” Grierson expanded on this issue in his writings, explaining that the people of Rajputana spoke a variety of dialects, such as Marwari, Mewari, and Jaipuri. While he grouped them under the single label ‘Rajasthani,’ the inhabitants neither identified with the term nor accepted it, as it obscured the native connections of each group. He also found the names of tribes “bewildering,” particularly with the Konkan standard dialect, which had many variations across the western coast of India.
Grierson also discussed the complexity of defining boundaries between languages and what is considered ‘domestic’ to India versus ‘foreign.’ In one volume of LSI, cited by Majeed in his journal article ‘A State of Affairs which is Essentially Indefinite’: The Linguistic Survey of India (2015), Grierson stated: “Indian languages gradually merge into each other and are not separated by hard and fast boundary lines. When such boundaries are spoken of, or are shown on the map, they ….[show] definitely a state of things which is in its essence indefinite.”
To illustrate, he highlighted the confusion between the dialects of Bengali, Oriya, and Bihari, and the challenges in mapping their boundaries. He also cited the example of Punjabi and Saraiki, the latter spoken in districts of Punjab province, Pakistan, and neighbouring areas of Sindh and Balochistan. He argued that while Punjab was the home of Saraiki, distinguishing between the two languages on a map could only be ‘approximate’ and a ‘purely arbitrary’ exercise. His perception of India, thus, according to Majeed in Nation and Region, was “an unbroken chain of dialects, all imperceptibly shading off into each other….”
Grierson’s magnum opus
LSI was a remarkable achievement of skill and hard work — painting what Majeed called “a comprehensive picture of India as a whole, linguistic region.” It was also the first project involving such a large group of Indians — schoolteachers, academics, and linguists — in the data-gathering process. The Indians, too, responded positively. The Maithili Sahitya Parishad (1931) praised Grierson’s work on Maithili, while the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad elected Grierson as an honorary member in 1929 for his treatment of the Bengali language.
In his interview, Majeed noted that the survey had dimensions beyond linguistics. “The LSI was grappling with and contributing to the question of cultural weight of languages, particularly regional languages and their literary traditions.” He explained that the survey, by recovering knowledge about vernaculars, “revealed the struggle between and hierarchy of grassroots multilingualism [languages spoken by the people] versus state-sponsored multilingualism [languages promoted by the state].” “Simply put, the most salutary thing the LSI did was to bring into public consciousness that just because something is called by the same name, does not mean it is the same language, with the same history,” says Ayesha Kidwai, linguist and academic.
Additionally, the LSI revealed the flaws in our geographical imagination of India as a linguistic region. “Where does the boundary for one language begin and the other end?” Majeed asked.
Majeed also highlights the financial and physical toll the project took on Grierson, including periods of depression and loss of eyesight. By 1898, Grierson had retired and moved to England, from where he carried out a bulk of correspondence for the survey. In Colonialism and Knowledge, Majeed describes LSI as a “thousand-men job” led by one man, which brought together a group of Indians “engineered by Grierson outside the strict confines of the colonial state yet brought together in print in volumes published by that state.”
Inadequacies and its successor
As with any study, the LSI had its share of inadequacies. One was Grierson’s communalised understanding of Indian society, where religious differences between Hindus and Muslims took centre stage. This led him to group Hindi as the ‘Hindu’ language, classifying it as a native Indian language while marking Urdu as foreign. Majeed notes that sections of the LSI echoed the Hindutva movement of the 1920s, portraying Muslims as invaders and Hindus as the invaded. “He ignored Hindi and Urdu’s shared history as a composite linguistic and literary culture,” Majeed writes in the Daily Star.
The LSI was also, to some extent, committed to the advancement of the Sanskrit language. Grierson viewed ‘Aryan’ India as the pinnacle of Indian civilisation, superseding the Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman cultures. Majeed identifies a section on the Khasa tribes in the LSI, which begins with a discussion of the tribe’s depiction in Sanskrit literature. Yet, Majeed asserts, “We need to weigh its [LSI] communalising aspects against its production of knowledge about South Asian languages and dialects and the mapping of its linguistic geography.”
Regarding inconsistencies in data collection, however, Grierson was quick to acknowledge the shortcomings and accept his ignorance. “Unlike other colonially arrogant writers, he’s very open about the provisional nature of his findings… he’s not camouflaging the inadequacies of the project,” Majeed told indianexpress.com. It is this openness which drew him many admirers, including literary critic and academic Ganesh Narayandas Devy. Drawn to Grierson’s work during his college days in the 1970s, Devy worked on what we know as the most recent linguistic survey — The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, initiated in 2010.
Unlike Grierson’s historical tracing of languages, Devy simply set out to map the geography and spread of languages in India. In an interview with indianexpress.com, Devy said, “My focus was people’s attachment, people’s bond with their language and their claim to that language… we agreed to accept that what mainstream linguists might describe as a dialect or subset of a language can still be claimed as language of the people.” He mentioned the example of Pahadi, which he found comprised 22 languages in Himachal Pradesh, while Kumaoni (in Uttarakhand) entailed 14 small languages.”
Reflecting on his learnings from PLSI, Devy said, “I realised that the entire human stock, not just India, is slowly giving up what we call oral language and shifting to a new order of language: visual language.” In this new order, he observed, the state, corporations, and technology all play a role, ultimately silencing humans.
Is multilingualism a problem?
Unlike the British Raj’s portrayal of the subcontinent as a society defined solely by caste and religious differences, the LSI presented India as a diverse linguistic region. That diversity, however, has become a subject of debate in the subcontinent.
“The idea that a nation-state should have one language is a heavily Eurocentric idea. It is also a distortion of the global reality of multilingualism because most nation-states in the Global South are multilingual,” remarked Majeed. He added, “But what the governing elite and even some citizens do is to kind of internalise this idea that one nation must equal one language.”
He observed that states prefer categorising citizens into neatly defined groups. While that is possible with religion, since being bi-religious is hard, it is nearly impossible with language in South Asia where most are at least bilingual. According to Majeed, it is the monolithic nature of religion that makes states more comfortable with it than with language. This anxiety around language became particularly pronounced for post-colonial states, where languages often transcend national borders. Citing examples of Bangla crossing the India-Bangladesh border and Punjabi spanning India and Pakistan, Majeed explained how cross-border linguistic connections cause discomfort, ultimately driving states towards monolingualism.
“The problem really is not multi but monolingualism, which limits your ways of negotiating with the world. Studies show that being multilingual is intellectually, neurologically, epistemologically– hugely important,” he said.
Kidwai added, “If there’s any inheritance from the colonial enterprise, it’s the desire for one language, one community. And somehow, our politics seems to operate within that framework.” She asserted, “We are, in fact, genetically endowed to be multilingual” – something Grierson’s LSI successfully showcased over a century ago.
