Malayalam aficionados have long been complaining, perhaps even for a few decades that the language is on the verge of extinction. The main reason for their grouse was the slow but steady shift in favour of English as the preferred medium of education in schools across the state. So large was the shift in favour of English education among the newer generations that it even led to large scale closure of government run schools which continued to teach in the mother tongue as mandated by the political leadership.

In fact the shift in favour of English medium education was kicked off by the growing middle classes who opted out of government owned schools which used Malayalam as the medium of instruction in the hope that the foreign language skill will be a big advantage when they migrate out of Kerala to other cities both inside and outside the country in search of employment. This ensured that use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction remained largely confined to the children of disadvantaged groups who had no choice, given their meagre incomes, but to opt for government run schools which charged almost no fees.

While these changes in the favour of English medium schools in Kerala is well documented at a general level there was still no great clarity about the exact extent of the shift in favour of English education and how it compared with the experience of other major Indian languages in schools across the country. Fortunately the latest report on Education in India, brought out by the National Sample Survey Office this week, tries to remedy this drawback and highlights how English is replacing Indian languages as the medium of instruction in school education across the country.

According to the report Hindi is the main language which is used at home by almost half (46.6%) the school student population. Hindi was followed by Bengali (7.9%), Marathi (5.9%), Telegu (5.8%), Tamil (4.9%), Gujarati (3.9%), Kannada (3.5), Odiya (3.1%) and Malayalam (2.5%) in that order.

Surprisingly the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction differed substantially across these nine major language groups. But despite that the mother tongue remained the medium of education for a predominant or at least a substantial proportion of the school students at least half a half a dozen of these major languages. But the only real outlier exception was Malayalam speaking children whose medium of instruction has almost been completely replaced by English especially at the higher levels.

This is most aptly brought out by the numbers on the medium of education at the higher secondary level, the level at which children complete their school education. According to the figures more than four fifth (81.5%) of the Hindi speaking children continued to have their mother tongue as the medium of instruction at the higher secondary level in 2014.

Similarly the mother tongue continues to be the most important medium of instruction at the higher secondary level in another seven other major Indian languages. This include Bengali, where 86% of the students continue to be taught in their mother tongue, followed by Gujarati (80.1%), Tamil (68.8%), Kannada (61%), Marathi (54.4%).

Only in the case of three Indian languages, namely Telegu, Odiya and Malayalam has English become the most important medium of instruction. However, in the case of Telegu and Odiya speaking students almost a third continue to be instructed in the mother tongue with the numbers being 38.5% and 32% respectively.

However, in the case of Malayalam speaking students their Mother tongue has almost disappeared as a medium of instruction with only 10.7% of the student population using it at the higher secondary level. In fact almost 87.7% of the Malayalam speaking students at the higher secondary level are taught in English which is their medium of instruction. No wonder that the Malayalam enthusiasts are running scared about the future of their mother tongue.