20 Pct of India's Languages Vanished in the Past 5 Decades: Survey

Bangalore: In the last 50 years, India one of the most linguistically diverse nation, lost about 20 percent of its languages, said a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre.

The country though comprises of twenty nine states and seven Union Territories, it had 1,100 languages in 1961, out of which 220 of them have vanished, reports Sandhya Soman for TNN.

Most of the disappeared languages are believed to belong to nomadic communities scattered across the country.
Ganesh Devy, lead co-ordinator, People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) said, "We have found 780 languages and must have missed about 100 or so. That makes it close to 880 languages. The rest have disappeared. It's a sad loss,” reports TNN.

"Were they alive, they would have been spoken by 3 percent to 4 percent of Indians, that is around five crore people. The absence of a policy on language conservation completed the process," added Devy. Lack of recognition, displacement of communities, the nonexistence of a livelihood option for speakers and stigma associated with 'under-developed' mother tongues are some of the main reasons behind disappearance of such languages.

The 1971 census listed just 108 languages due to the central government's decision to include languages with only 10,000 speakers, while all the other languages were put in the 'others' section. Because of continuing such practices many languages tend to be forgotten and ultimately disappear from the human civilization. The PLSI survey was carried since 2011, however, it has listed all the existing languages in India.

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