Recording India’s Linguistic Riches as Leaders Push Hindi as Nation’s Tongue
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Jun 12, 2022, 6:44:05 PM6/12/22
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source - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/world/asia/india-languages-ganesh-devy.html
By Sameer Yasir
Published June 11, 2022
Published June 11, 2022
Recording India’s Linguistic Riches as Leaders Push Hindi as Nation’s Tongue
Ganesh Devy has spent decades documenting India’s hundreds of distinct languages. Up next: a 12,000-year history of India he hopes will help counter the government’s Hindu-first campaign.
The task was gargantuan: assembling a team of more than 3,500 language specialists, academics and enthusiastic amateurs to determine just how many distinct languages still exist in India, a country of stunning linguistic diversity.
Ganesh Narayan Devy has been obsessed with that question since, as a young scholar of literature, he came across a linguistic census from 1971 that listed 108 mother tongues spoken by Indians. At the end of the report, at No. 109, it said “all others.”
“I wondered what ‘all others’ could be,” he said.
It turns out to be a huge number: His team’s survey, perhaps the most exhaustive such effort ever in India, has researched 780 languages currently being used in the country, with hundreds more left to be studied.
India’s Constitution, in contrast, lists 22 languages, and the last government census in 2011 named 121 “major” languages with 10,000 speakers or more.
Mr. Devy’s findings, which he has been gradually publishing in a series of scholarly volumes, come at a sensitive time, as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing to adopt Hindi as the national language, part of its broader Hindu-first vision for India.
As his language research is being rolled out, Mr. Devy has immersed himself in a new project that takes on what is perhaps an even bigger and more contentious issue in India’s culture wars: the country’s long history.
Ganesh Narayan Devy has been obsessed with that question since, as a young scholar of literature, he came across a linguistic census from 1971 that listed 108 mother tongues spoken by Indians. At the end of the report, at No. 109, it said “all others.”
“I wondered what ‘all others’ could be,” he said.
It turns out to be a huge number: His team’s survey, perhaps the most exhaustive such effort ever in India, has researched 780 languages currently being used in the country, with hundreds more left to be studied.
India’s Constitution, in contrast, lists 22 languages, and the last government census in 2011 named 121 “major” languages with 10,000 speakers or more.
Mr. Devy’s findings, which he has been gradually publishing in a series of scholarly volumes, come at a sensitive time, as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing to adopt Hindi as the national language, part of its broader Hindu-first vision for India.
As his language research is being rolled out, Mr. Devy has immersed himself in a new project that takes on what is perhaps an even bigger and more contentious issue in India’s culture wars: the country’s long history.
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