The dwindling/ endangered/ vulnerable languages of India
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220 languages lost since 1961
India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years: Survey
Most Were Spoken By Nomads
Sandhya Soman TNN
The Times of India 2013/08/09
Mumbai: India has lost around 20% of its languages in the past five decades, a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has revealed.
The country had 1,100 languages in 1961, but nearly 220 of them have disappeared, said Ganesh Devy, writer and lead coordinator of the survey called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). The survey was carried out over two years from 2011.
“We have found 780 languages and must have missed about 100 or so. That makes it close to 880 languages. The rest have disappeared,” he said.
Most of them belonged to nomadic communities. “Were they alive, they would have been spoken by 3% to 4% of Indians, that is around 5 crore people,” Devy said. The reasons for the disappearance are a lack of recognition, displacement of communities, the absence of a livelihood option for speakers and stigma against ‘under-developed’ mother tongues.
HOW THE COUNT WENT DOWN IN 1971
The 1961 census listed 1,652 languages, which were cut to 1,100 as many were found to be variants.
The 1971 census listed only 108 as the government decided to document only those languages which had more than 10,000 speakers. The rest were included in the ‘others’ section. The new survey does not follow this norm but includes all languages
METHODOLOGY OF THE SURVEY
Nearly 3,000 PLSI volunteers reached out to community groups, linguists and activists to document various languages and the history of their speakers
No policy to conserve languages
Mumbai: The absence of a policy on language conservation has contributed to the loss of about 20% of India’s languages in the past five decades, said Ganesh Devy, writer and lead co-ordinator of the survey called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI).
The census of 1961 had recorded 1,652 languages in all, but taking into account the fact that variants of many languages had found a place in this list, the number was later brought down to 1,100.
In 1971, the census had listed only 108 languages due to the central government’s decision to document only those which had more than 10,000 speakers. All other languages were included in the ‘others’ section. The practice continues and many languages remain forgotten. The PLSI, however, hasn’t gone by the government norm; it listed all languages.
A Marathi volume on languages in Maharashtra, called ‘Maharashtratil Bhasha’, put together by the institute, was released in Pune on August 17 2013. There are 49 more such volumes as part of the survey, which were released in New Delhi on September 5, 2013
Some successes, as in 2019
Ishita Mishra, Nov 16, 2019: The Times of India
From: Ishita Mishra, Nov 16, 2019: The Times of India
Padma Shri Ganesh N Devy, who helmed the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a government study between 2010 and 2013, told TOI, “A script can be in Roman or Devanagari or both. One can introduce marks like ‘ nukta’ or ‘ ardhachandras’ to solve the issue with phonetics. Punjabi language uses Gurmukhi, Persian and Arabic script while Santhali has eight types of scripts. As long as they find acceptability with speakers, it works. But creating new script for a language in India has never been easy. In case of Kokborok — spoken by Tripura’s Borok — creation of its script led to an uprising.”
Kokborok was recognised by the Tripura government in 1979 and became the second state language after Bengali. When Kokborok was introduced in schools, Bengali script was accepted for Kokborok textbooks. But a majority of the indigenous educated youth was in favour of the Roman script and this led to a major unrest.
Vaishna Narang, former professor at JNU’s languages department, said an important way to preserve language is to use it in media, be it social media or television. She cited the example of Gondi spoken by the Gond tribe with 1.2 crore members across Bastar in Chhattisgarh, parts of Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. According to the 2011 Census, only 27 lakh Gond spoke the language but new estimates suggest numbers of Gondi speakers have shot up.
Subhranshu Chaudhary, who runs CGNet Swara, an NGO that works to propagate and preserve Gondi, told TOI, “In Bastar, Gondi is now taught in schools. There are newspapers and news bulletins in Gondi and its literature is being translated to other languages —such as English and French — with the help of IIT Raipur and Microsoft Research.”
Devy added migration plays a major role in the loss of indigenous languages. “The state must ensure indigenous tribes have livelihood. If they don’t have work, they will migrate and adopt new languages and cultures,” he said.
But government help or not, Rungs are determined to preserve their heritage. At a recent Rung workshop in Dehradun, boys performed a traditional dance while judges doled out questions on Rung culture to young participants. At the entrance, 19-year-old Pranita greeted guests. “ Gan hum eno?’ (How are you?),” said one. “It’s gan hum ino,” Pranita immediately corrected as elders at a distance beamed approvingly.
