Govt considering demand to declare Kannada as classical language

New Delhi, Aug 8 (UNI) The demand to confer 'Classical Language' status on Kannada language is under consideration of the government, a Culture Ministry official today said.

''A meeting to discuss the demand is likely to be held next month,'' the official said, pointing out that only two languages -- Tamil and Sanskrit -- had so far been declared as 'Classical Language' in view of their high antiquity and a rich corpus of literature.

The Karnataka government and several other organisations have made representations to confer the 'Classical Language' status to Kannada language, advancing the plea that it has rich original literary and grammatical traditions, its own script system and an unbroken history.

''The requests have been forwarded to Sahitya Akademi for the consideration of the Committee of Linguistic Experts,'' he pointed out.

The government has created a new category of languages as ''Classical Languages'', and charted out some criteria, with the help of Sahitya Akademi, to determine the eligibility of languages to be considered for classification in this category.

The criteria, according to a Cabinet report, include that ''a language should be of great antiquity and should have its early texts dating back at least 1,000 years.'' However, the governemnt later extended the period to 1500-2000 years.

Further, the language should also have a body of ancient literature and texts considered a valuable heritage; its literary tradition should be original and not borrowed from another ''speech community'', and its literature must be distinct from modern.

However, there may also be a discontinuity between the classical language and its later forms or of its offshoots like Latin versus Roman, Sanskrit-Pali versus Prakrit, and modern Indo-Aryan.

In support of their demand for Classical Language status to Kannada, scholars have pointed out that the Kannada word ''Isila'' is found in Ashoka's Brahmagiri inscription, which dates back to 300 BC.

Similarly, the word ''Karnataka'' is found in the Sanskrit Mahabharata.

According to Tamil scholar Iravata Mahadevan, influence of Kannada can be found in the Tamil inscriptions of 200 BC to 100 BC.

The words ''Ghata sapta shahi'' were found in a Greek drama written in 200 AD. A full-bodied Kannada text is found in the Halmidi Inscription of 450 AD. Over 30,000 Kannada inscriptions found were dated after that period -- a pointer to the antiquity of Kannada language.

The British Administration had treated Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic as classical languages and made special provisions and support mechanism for developing these languages.

This later prompted a demand from Tamil scholars to accord a similar status on Tamil language in the context of the strong Tamil tradition and tendency to maintain its own distinct character through various linguistic, literary, religious, anthropological, sociological, cultural and architectural means and contributions.

In October 2004, the Union Government accorded classical language status to Tamil. This was followed by Sanskrit, which was given the classical language tag in January 2005.

UNI