On Wednesday, Sahitya Akademi, which is celebrating its annual literature festival Festival of Letters had an interesting session on India’s unscripted languages which are on the brink of extinction. It was chaired by Professor Anvita Abbi, who has recently taken over as Director Centre for Oral and Tribal literature at the Akademi.

The two times national awardee, who is currently working on the Great Andamanese languages reveals interesting information on the state of languages in the country.

“According to the government’s 2001 census, India has 1576 “'rationalised” mother tongues and the new census (2011) is still not out. And as per US-based international language body, Ethnologue, India has 454 languages out of which only 120 are scripted and rest are unscripted. Therefore, India has more unscripted, hence endangered languages than scripted languages,” says the professor. Significantly, she adds, “Most of these unscripted languages include dialects which are spoken in various parts of Jammu and Kashmir, some in North East and rest in other parts of the country”. Notably, the Great Andamanese language, she bemoans is now spoken among just five speakers and as the language is not protected through scripts there is an urgent need to save the richness of the language and the culture.

The educationist says that “rationalised mother tongues” are so called because when a census gatherer goes from family to family, he or she asks their mother tongue. In several cases, the family members themselves don’t know the ‘name of the language’ they speak. So if they are speaking Punjabi and have some background from Lahore, they would say, ‘we speak ‘Lahaoria’ or ‘párdesia’ or ‘Videsia'', which are no languages but local derivatives from a specific locations.Despite the All India Radio broadcasting programmes in 146 languages, the reach is meagre. “In India schools impart education in 70 languages, despite that a large number of languages are neither recognised nor written or identified because the schools don’t teach them,” she says.

She cites an interesting example. “I went to a school in Chhattisgarh where some students were made to stand outside their class during a scorching afternoon. Two girls fainted before me. I asked the teacher what was the punishment for? The teacher said, ‘They are not answering my question’. I asked the punished students who unanimously said they were not able to answer because the teacher asked them to answer in Hindi and they didn’t know to reply in Hindi but had replied in their own language. I asked the teacher why he is not using the local dialect? He said that the books are in Hindi, so how could he use the local language?’”

“That’s where the problem lies. The hegemony of a State language kills the various dialects of the language totally,” recalls the professor who has created the script for the Great Andamanese language recently for the first time in the country.

She also plans to create a “House of Voice” to protect sounds of the unwritten forms of various dialects and languages and is working on saving Toda (tribal) language spoken in Nilgiris, as well as ‘Halbi’ language of Bastar, “to begin with” as she puts it.