By Varun Gandhi

The Taushiro language in the Amazon basin in Peru has only one speaker left. The Resigaro language, in the same region, also suffers from the same fate. The cultural weight of Spanish is turning this ancient Incan land into a homogeneous State.

Wherever English has spread in the last 200 years, local languages have been wiped out. Over 100 aboriginal languages in Australia have disappeared in the last two centuries. Similar stories abound in India.

The 1961 census records India as having 1,652 languages. By 1971, it was 808. Over 220 Indian languages have been lost in the last 50 years, with a further 197 languages categorised as endangered according to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, 2013. Somehow, despite our faith in diversity, we simply are not able to quantify it, especially in terms of languages and dialects.

Mind Your Language

A simple act of bureaucracy can often be a tool for genocide for a language or a dialect. The British India government brought in the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871 (rescinded only in 1952). The Act described certain communities (mostly nomadic) as criminal by birth, stigmatising them and forcing them to conceal their cultural identity and suppress their languages.

GoI currently defines a language as one that is marked by a script, effectively neutering oral languages. India’s official number of languages, 122, is far lower than the 780 counted by the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (along with a further 100 suspected to exist). This discrepancy is caused primarily because GoI doesn’t recognise any language with less than 10,000 speakers.

Funding remains important as well. Germany spends over $6.7 billion on courses to help regional languages thrive. After decades of ignoring Welsh, Britain now spends $201 million annually to support Welsh schools and subsidise Welsh media.

Of the 197 endangered languages, only Boro and Meithei have official status in India, as they have a writing system. Such an Act forgets that most of our great scriptures and epics are part of an oral tradition, embossed into actual writing over centuries. Such methodologies should be reformed, granting greater recognition to oral traditions in different languages.

While the Central Institute of Indian Languages has done some exemplary work in researching and documenting Indian languages — besides introducing the ‘Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages of India’, there has been limited progress in actual outcomes. Further challenges remain. Optical character recognition for digitising Indian languages is still primitive, besides lacking humongous efforts required for proofreading.

A proven method to ensure survival of languages is the development of schools that teach in them, enabling the new speakers to preserve and enrich the language. A vast digital project — on the lines of Project Tiger — for preserving and growing India’s endangered languages must be launched. Audio-visual documentation of the important aspects of such language — like storytelling, folk literature and history — will be an ideal start. Such a movement should use crosslanguage open source tools, such as LinguaLibre, Kathabhidana and Pronouncify, to help build pronunciation libraries. Existing work from groundbreaking initiatives like Global Language Hotspots can be used to enhance such documentation efforts.

Family Reunion

Similarly, the 2% corporate social responsibility (CSR) limit should be encouraged to be spent on saving languages and crafts, documenting them and building accessibility tools. Such databases could then be utilised for linguistic research, linking languages from the same families (e.g., Odia with Ho, Munda, Khadia and Kui). Young speakers can be encouraged through spoken interactions, exchanges, apps and podcasts to preserve and grow their language, as witnessed in Tlingit and Choctaw tribes in US.

But, ultimately, languages are not preserved by documentation but by having a profusion of people speaking them. State support continues to remain necessary. There remains little institutional support for growing languages like Bhojpuri, or declining languages like Mehali (Maharashtra), Sidi (Gujarat) and Majhi (Sikkim). Their revival is dependent on ensuring livelihood support for the speakers of the language.

India is one of the most linguistically rich countries. When we lose a language, it is a loss of an entire universe, including its cultural myths and rituals. Ignoring languages with fewer speakers will simply not do. Languages like Hindi have over 126 languages feeding into them. Cutting down on such roots will harm the larger languages as well.

There is still hope. A language like Bhil has showcased an 85% growth in speakers in the last 20 years. We need a new social contract where we seek to preserve the orality and textual nature of languages using digital means. Such a practice would keep India’s purported pluralism alive, giving it renewal.

(The writer is a BJP MP)