India to undertake Linguistic survey

New Delhi, Mar 13 (UNI) The Centre will conduct a Linguistic survey of the country, the Lok Sabha was informed today.

The report of the survey would, however, be available after ten years of its commissioning. Minister of State for Human Resources Development D Purandeswari said in reply to an unstarred question.

She said the survey was aimed at providing systemtic and comprehensive account of the status of Indian lanquaqe diversity, multilingualism, inter-lingual relation, and dynamics of language.

Ms Purandeswari said advances in technology would be used to document and prepare databases of different kinds, corpora of spoken and written varieties and produce a wide range of linguistic material in both print and electronic form.

In this contest, she pointed out that there were 114 languages in the country as per census 1991. There were 216 mother tongues, each of which is spoken by 10,000 of more people.

She said the 216 languages were spoken by nearly 99 per cent of the population. They belonged to four lanquage families-Indo Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman.

UNI