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Indians express in 850 languages
India is four times richer than Europe, in terms of language, with Indians able to express themselves in over 850 languages as compared to Europeans who can speak only about 250 languages, according to findings of the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). "England has not more than four or five languages of its own at the most. Out of those only two – English and Welsh - are doing well.
- Four times wealthier than Europe
- Assam same size of England has 52 languages
- Europeans can speak about 250 languages
New Delhi (PTI): India is four times richer than Europe, in terms of language, with Indians able to express themselves in over 850 languages as compared to Europeans who can speak only about 250 languages, according to findings of the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). "England has not more than four or five languages of its own at the most. Out of those only two – English and Welsh - are doing well.
Meanwhile a state like Assam which is more or less the size of England has a good 52 languages," says Ganesh Devy a noted linguist and chairman of PLSI. Devy, draws a contrast with Paris headquartered UNESCO, an organisation that seeks to promote many languages, which allows but five languages in its deliberations.
"On the other hand Indian courts and offices allow use of 22 languages," says the linguist who recently completed an ambitious survey in the country, which identified 860 Indian languages. "In India we have several hundred living languages. It could be more than 850, out of which we were able to study 780 languages. And if the benchmark is the 1961 census we have lost 250 languages in last 50 years," he says in the survey carried after over 100 years after George Abraham Grierson under British Raj undertook such an exercise in the country.
The survey was spearheaded by Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, which has already released "Maharashtratil Bhasha", a Marathi volume on languages. 49 more such volumes are scheduled to be released here on September 5. Columnist Arun Jakhde, who published the Maharashtra volume of the survey, says the survey celebrates the diversity of the country and is not a lament on the lost languages.
"For me, 60 languages which we surveyed in Maharashtra are 60 different sounds (dhwani) through which my state should be identified," he says. Jakhde points out that he did not go by conventional definitions of dialects and languages. "In the PLSI, we decided not to stigmatise languages which communities wanted to claim as 'languages' by calling them dialects merely because they had not got into any written form. Writing and scripts are a later day acquisitions of languages," Jakhde says.
Pointing out that for about the first 65,000 years of the history of human languages, all languages in world remained non-written and non-scripted. "Given these facts, I have no difficulty in minimising the importance of the correspondence between oral languages and dialects," he says.
"You may recall the George Bernard Shaw's 'Pigmallion', or the later day Willy Russel's 'Educating Rita'. These books amply demonstrate show how unscientific the notion of dialect is. When a language gets into print, the varieties that do not get printed come to be seen as dialects," he explains.
Jakhde points out that Grierson in his "Linguistic Survey of India" had used the term dialect quite generously. "He classified nearly three out of every four speech varieties that he examined as dialects," says Jakhde. A Unesco Linguapax laureate, 63-year-old Devy says, “We have prepared a baseline and it's a first survey of living languages in India.”
