CIIL to take up biggest linguistic study

Mysore, May 18 (UNI) The city-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) is all set to launch the biggest linguistic study of its kind in the world from August 15.

Addressing media persons here, CIIL Director Uday Narayan Singh said the study - New Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI) at an estimated cost of Rs 588 crore, sanctioned in the planning commission of India, aimed to study one fourth of the languages of the world.

CIIL would be holding a training programme for over 300 people from 44 Universities along with 100 scholars in the field of linguistics from all over the country to participate as resource persons. Stating that the NLSI would be taken up for next ten years, he said that the study would involve 12,000 persons making extensive use of information technology, he said.

The CIIL Director said the original Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) was conceived in 1894 and the work began in 1898. It was supervised by Sir George Grierson, an Irish P Hilogist posted in India as part of the British India administration. The original LSI identified 188 languages and 544 dialects in the country. It was done by one lakh untrained field workers, which had excluded the former province of Madras and the princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore. Grierson produced a monumental 19 volume work titled Linguistic Survey of India published in 1927.

Mr Singh said that the main objectives of the NLSI was to create a profile of Indian linguistic space in terms of the structure of its speech varieties, their distribution and their interactions, formulate catalogue of the ways and means by which Indian linguistic diversity was expressed in terms of its language and literary artifacts.

He said the training would concentrate folklore, literature, anthropological linguistics and typological characters of Indo, Aryan, Dravidian, Astro Asiatic and Tibeto Burman languages and work on that. The projected aimed at preservation of languages would be expected to complete in the next ten years and final report would be out by 2017.

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