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220 languages lost since 1961

India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years: Survey

Most Were Spoken By Nomads

Sandhya Soman TNN

The Times of India 2013/08/09

The number of languages in India: 1961 and 2013

Mumbai: India has lost around 20% of its languages in the past five decades, a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has revealed.

The country had 1,100 languages in 1961, but nearly 220 of them have disappeared, said Ganesh Devy, writer and lead coordinator of the survey called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). The survey was carried out over two years from 2011.

“We have found 780 languages and must have missed about 100 or so. That makes it close to 880 languages. The rest have disappeared,” he said.

Most of them belonged to nomadic communities. “Were they alive, they would have been spoken by 3% to 4% of Indians, that is around 5 crore people,” Devy said. The reasons for the disappearance are a lack of recognition, displacement of communities, the absence of a livelihood option for speakers and stigma against ‘under-developed’ mother tongues.

HOW THE COUNT WENT DOWN IN 1971

The 1961 census listed 1,652 languages, which were cut to 1,100 as many were found to be variants.

The 1971 census listed only 108 as the government decided to document only those languages which had more than 10,000 speakers. The rest were included in the ‘others’ section. The new survey does not follow this norm but includes all languages

METHODOLOGY OF THE SURVEY

Nearly 3,000 PLSI volunteers reached out to community groups, linguists and activists to document various languages and the history of their speakers

No policy to conserve languages

Mumbai: The absence of a policy on language conservation has contributed to the loss of about 20% of India’s languages in the past five decades, said Ganesh Devy, writer and lead co-ordinator of the survey called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI).

The census of 1961 had recorded 1,652 languages in all, but taking into account the fact that variants of many languages had found a place in this list, the number was later brought down to 1,100.

In 1971, the census had listed only 108 languages due to the central government’s decision to document only those which had more than 10,000 speakers. All other languages were included in the ‘others’ section. The practice continues and many languages remain forgotten. The PLSI, however, hasn’t gone by the government norm; it listed all languages.

A Marathi volume on languages in Maharashtra, called ‘Maharashtratil Bhasha’, put together by the institute, was released in Pune on August 17 2013. There are 49 more such volumes as part of the survey, which were released in New Delhi on September 5, 2013