Bengali not under threat, rather it is threatening Bengal’s marginal languages, says translation scholar

Bengali is not so much threatened by Hindi as other indigenous local languages of West Bengal are by Bengali, and not much effort is being made to save them, according to an award-winning Kolkata-based literary scholar who is trying to preserve tribal languages in the State through translation. There are many other tribal languages in West Bengal which are taking their final breaths, surrendering to Bengali,” Mrinmoy Pramanick, who is with the Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature at the University of Calcutta, said. This will be a remarkable and revolutionary policy decision,” Dr. Pramanick, who recently won the Sahitya Akademi award for Bengali translation of Marathi author Sharankumar Limbale’s work Dalit Nandantattwa, said. According to him, one reason many languages became extinct was due to the 1961 census, when the Centre decided that any language spoken by less than 10,000 people would not count as citizen’s language. But it is true that Bengali hegemony is there upon other marginal languages of West Bengal — Toto, Lodha, and Birhor are among three critically endangered languages and these three even belong to ‘particularly vulnerable tribal groups’ as recognised by the Government of India,” he said.