New Linguistic Survey of India in April 2007

Mysore, Nov 15: The Union Human Resources Development Ministry has entrusted with the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) here the national project of taking up the New Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI) for the next ten years, commencing from April 2007.

The NLSI would not only fill the gaps left in the earlier surveys and linguistic research, but also provide a landmark in the history of linguistic research in India. It would open up new vistas for future linguistic research on the vast linguistic potential of the country.

As more than a century had passed since Sir George Griersons' Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) (1898-1927) had begun and 80 years since it was last revised, the need for a fresh linguistic survey was being urgently felt.

Talking to sources here, CIIL Deputy Director Prof Rajesh Sachdeva said the advances in language technology and mass communication now locate language as a service, thereby posing new challenges to the perpetuation and maintenance of India's linguistic diversity. The new survey, by providing rigorous scientific description of all the languages of India, would provide the base for uniform access to these scientific advances. The NLSI would conclusively demonstrate the standards India sets for responsible and responsive governance, dignity and respect for diversity, he added.

He said the budget for the project would be Rs 280 crore, to be released by the HRD Ministry during the 11th five-year plan. As many as 40 universities under the University Grants Commission (UGC) have been selected for the project. The Centre would release Rs 200 crore to the UGC, which would inturn disburse the appropriate amount to the varsities and institutions on a direction from an Empowered Committee constituted by the Ministry. The Ministry would release Rs 80 crore to the CIIL, a wing of the department of higher education under the HRD Ministry, for coordinating activities under the NLSI, he added.

Prof Sachdeva said that to carry out such a large scale survey, it was necessary to envisage the training process as intensive, continuous and upgradation process, that comprised a continuous evaluation of the successes and failures of the process itself. The training programmes would include basic training in field work, data gathering, phonetics, morphological and syntactic description, socio-lingistics and other areas of descriptive linguistics, besides training in tagging, database creation and updation.

According to an estimate, ther were 1,652 mother tongues in India, including 103 foreign mother tongues. There were different theories about how many of these mother tongues qualify to be described as independent languages. Even Griersons' 12 volume LSI (1903-1923), material for which was collected in the last decade of the 19th century, had identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The 1921 census report also showed 188 languages and 49 dialects. Out of these mother tongues, 184 (1991 census) or at least 112 (1981 census) had more than 10,000 speakers.

However, the numbers varied with each estimate. For instance, the Encyclopaedic People of India series of the Anthropological Survey of India identified 75 major languages out of a total of 325 languages used in India households ethnologue. It reported India as a home of 398 languages, including 387 living and 11 extinct languages. In as early as 1990's, India was reported to have languages with one million or more speakers.

The NLSI project would pave the way for increasing higher education and literacy rates in the country, which would boost the overall development of the country not only economically but also culturally.

Prof Sachdeva said the funds to the CIIL would be meant for field work, printing and publishing of reports and academic publications under the NLSI, publication of data, analysis, information and reports, creation and maintenance of date archive, audio visual documentation and creation of infrastructure needed by the CIIL. He said the objectives of the NLSI could be divided into three broad areas of interest and activity. Firstly, a profile of the Indian linguistic space in terms of the structure of its speech varieties, their distribution and interactions, secondly a catalogue of the ways and means by which Indian linguistic diversity was expressed in terms of its language/literary artefacts and then a knowledge base for means by which the potential of diverse Indian languages to interface with technological advancements could be realised.

Prof Sachdeva said about 10,000 people would work on the project.

Taking into account the survey research techniques and innovations in different parts of the world, the survey would overcome limitations of the Griersons' survey and other surveys, besides extending the strengths and achievements of the earlier works, incorporating and consolidating the earlier studies.

It aimed at providing a systematic and comprehensive account of the current status of language diversity, multi-lingualism, inter-lingual relationships and dynamics and language literature, culture, identity and inter-lingual communication and inter-cultural understanding. The survey would document, prepare databases of different kinds, produce a wide range of linguistic materials of linguistic resources in both print and electronic form, he added.

In terms of its multi-disciplinary objectives, he said the NLSI would be unique and the variety and depth of its outcome would prove invaluable for scholars from different disciplines such as linguistics, Indian languages, demography, anthropology, sociology, economics, statistics, information sciences and technology, creative writing, comparative literature and translation studies. In terms of its participatory methodology, the NLSI would set a new example for means of knowledge creation that drew on shared individual and community resources and yielded outcome that could be assessed for the betterment of the individual as well as the community.

UNI