The Hindu : New Delhi News : Project to save minor languages

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
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New Delhi

New Delhi

Project to save minor languages

Anita Joshua

450 languages in India are spoken by less than 10,000 people each
The project would be administered by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore

NEW DELHI: The Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has drafted a project to salvage the minor languages from possible extinction in the not-so-distant future. Christened the ‘Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana’ — Scheme for the Development and Promotion of Minor Indian Languages — the project is aimed at preserving languages not covered under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution; primarily those spoken by about 10,000 or lesser number of persons.

According to the 2001 Census, India is home to nearly 100 languages, spoken by at least 10,000 people each.

And the list grows to 450 if the parameter of 10,000 or more speakers is not applied. Quoting studies by anthropologists, sociologists and historians, who have found considerable “literary and imaginative activity” in these languages, the Ministry’s contention is that urgent steps should be taken to preserve the “unique heritage” India has in its linguistic diversity.

As school education using the scheduled languages gains roots, the Ministry fears the linguistic traditions would be eclipsed in the absence of governmental effort to keep them alive.

With little or no employment opportunities available in these languages, the prediction is that they would die a natural death as the younger generations from these linguistic traditions join the mainstream.

It would be administered by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, and the target allocation the Ministry is pitching for, in the XI Five-Year Plan, is Rs.50 crore. Besides documentation of languages and literature available in these primarily oral traditions, the scheme also involves historical and sociological research on scripts and orthographic conventions, typographic and design projects, and linguistic and lexicographic research.

Other tasks include preparation of pictorial glossaries, dictionaries and grammar books, textbooks for primary/secondary schooling, teacher training programmes, and a National Encyclopaedia or Regional Encyclopaedias of Non-Scheduled Languages.

The academic reasons for nurturing these minor languages apart, the Ministry has also provided a political rationale for such an endeavour.

In its presentation to Planning Commission, it has sought to point out that the socio-linguistic development of small and marginalised communities is crucial in a polyglot country like India.

The recent listing of the global hotspots of endangered languages by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has added muscle to the Ministry’s position as it tries to persuade the Planning Commission to take this project on board. The Ministry’s contention is that India is not on this list primarily because of its rich oral tradition.

But, the fear is that India could well become a candidate sometime in the foreseeable future with the spread of education.

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