CIIL director Udaya Narayana Singh

MYSORE: The "New Linguistic Survey of India" will begin from August 15, nearly 80 years after the first survey supervised was by Irish philologist Sir George Abraham Grierson was completed. Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in collaboration with 44 universities is preparing in a big way to initiate the work.

While Grierson had employed over one lakh personnel to conduct the survey a century ago, CIIL will deploy 1,200 linguists and language scholars, after training them on the exact methods to conduct the survey.

Each trained linguist will get support from 10 more persons, who will assist him or her in documenting and recording. Their skills will be honed in the 40 days workshop, which will commence in Mysore from May 21.

Over hundred scholars, including noted linguists Prabol Das Gupta of Bengal, Ramakantha Agnihotri of Delhi, H.S. Ananthanarayana of Mysore, Surjit Singh from Patiala and Jawaharlal Handoo, will guide the linguists. Workshops will be conducted in four phases during summer and winter seasons and in the first phase of the programme, 300 linguists will be trained. After this "brain storming" workshop, trained linguists will be assigned the job of conducting the survey.

CIIL director Udaya Narayana Singh told presspersons here on Friday that it had been planned to launch the survey from the North East and Himachal Pradesh.

"So far no attempts were made to study more than 100 languages, which is being spoken by less than 10,000 people and attention was focused on the mainstream languages, which is being used by 96 per cent of the people. In view of helping voiceless minorities by bringing them to mainstream and by making them literate in their own mother tongue, it has been decided to concentrate more on the language spoken by less than 3 per cent of the people," he said.

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