National language meet calls for linguistic survey

VADODARA - Eminent linguist and the founder director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages D.P. Pattanayak Monday urged the central government to conduct the long overdue linguistic survey in the country.

This is the only way to know all our languages,” Pattanayak said.

The octogenarian was speaking at the inauguration of the two-day Bharat Bhasha Confluence, organised by the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, which began here Monday.

Among those present were speakers of 320 Indian languages representing all states and union territories along with a host of luminaries, including writer-activist Mahasveta Devi and noted Gandhian Narayanbhai Desai.

Pattanayak pointed out that all Indian languages are threatened. And it is not only the small, tribal languages, but even major languages like Hindi.

We are witnessing a situation where English is at the top while 35 Indian languages are at the bottom. The smaller languages are facing a double threat from English and the major Indian languages, he added.

The issue of the linguistic survey was taken up by Kamalini Sengupta, director of INTACH Intangible Cultural Heritage, with Rajesh Sachdeva, who is current director of the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages. He conceded that accurate information on the number of languages, especially smaller languages, was a need of the hour.

On the linguistic survey, he said the government “has developed cold feet.

I am sorry about the linguistic survey, Pattanayak said later during his speech. We do not care about the tribals. There is nothing about them in our history, geography and social sciences, he said.

Earlier, the first-of-its-kind gathering of Indian Bhasha speakers was opened with invocations in various Indian languages, including Uttarakhandi, Bangla, Kannada, Sanketi, Tulu, Konkani, Malayalam, and Gujarati.

Renowned sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan said: This is not a confluence of dead languages. We are here to celebrate languages.

He said that modern democracy cannot be built on English, as a true democracy has to be multi-lingual.

In his opening remarks, Ganesh Devy expressed concern that while our cities have become Bhasha Bharat (drawn from Mahabharat) with migrations of speakers of different languages, we did not prepare them for this situation, leading to many social problems.

Among those who spoke on the occasion was noted linguist Anvita Abbi from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who shared her experience of having a close association with Boa Sr, an 85-year-old Andamanese woman. Boa Sr was the last surviving speaker of the Bo language and passed away on January 26 this year.

With her a language of 65,000 years has died. Most foreign publications covered the news, but very few in the Indian media wrote about Boa Sr, Abbi regretted.

Later in the evening, all the 600-odd participants walked in a procession carrying placards displaying the names of the 320 languages they represented.