When languages in India disappear, they take more than words with them
“It depends.”
This is probably not the answer you expect from a question as simple as “how many languages does India have?” And yet the answer depends on who you ask. The constitution of India lists 22 scheduled languages. The popular linguistic survey of India, a basic effort of the activist Ganesh Narayan Devy, records 780 modern languages and still notes 70. The last census of 2011 claims that more than 19,500 languages and dialects are spoken in India. Most of them, belonging to the Adivasi, nomads, hills, islands and coastal communities, live in the shadow of dominant languages. Several have no scripts and are not officially recognized. Many, spoken by less than a hundred people, switch to the edge of extinction.
We rarely hear these languages in the media. When we do, they are in the form of a catchy gibberish or a babbling threatening with a villain. Think of “jhingalala hu” in Shalimar‘S (1978) “Hum Bewafa” or the invented language of the Kalakeya warriors’ tribe Baahubali (2015). These languages are often presented as primitive and their loudspeakers painted as simple, wild or unintelligible.
“Pehchaan” is a word that Ganesh Birua, a linguistic activist from the Ho Adivasi community in Odisha, often uses the importance of the language. He explains how Didayi, an Austro-Asian language from the Malkangiri region, is about to disappear. Young people in the community do not speak it. “In the future, children will grow without hearing their own language. Kisi ko pata nahin hoga ka aisa koi tribe bhi hua karta tha (nobody will know that such a tribe existed). ”
While English, Mandarin, French and Spanish dominate global conversations, speakers of other languages are faced with intense pressure to assimilate. Today, almost 80% of the world’s population speaks only 1% of its languages. Even in India – the 14th most diverse linguistic region in the world according to the Greenberg diversity index – the diversity of speeches disappears at an alarming rate. Several studies show that as an economy increases, its languages tend to escape. For most Indians, mastery of the language of the colonizer or national “official” languages often decides that crosses the velvet rope – whether in groups of friends, in the workplace, in hospitals or on social networks.
Birua himself grew up without knowing the Warang-Citi script of his mother tongue, Ho. It was around 2013 when, after recently learned the script, he looked for it online but found nothing. With limited access to the Internet and the telephone, he created social media accounts to teach letters and vocabulary, using Odia and translations in English.
