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 The British India government brought in the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871 (rescinded only in 1952).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.
Don’t leave words hanging
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