INDIA, THIS SIDE | Our endangered tongues: The rising threat to Indian languages

Published : Mar 23, 2023 10:35 IST - 7 MINS READ Over the last three decades, scientists have come up with mathematical models to predict the life of languages. Obviously, the nations and communities that have learnt to live within a single language, whose economic well-being is not dependent on knowing languages other than their own, whose knowledge systems are secure within their own languages, will not experience the stress of language loss, at least not immediately, although the loss of the world’s total language heritage will have numerous indirect enfeebling effects for them too. Language as cultural capital Some of the predictions maintain that out of approximately “6,000-plus” existing languages, not more than 300 will survive into the 22nd century. Since Sir William Jones’ time, major attempts have been made to propose and formulate cognitive categories to describe the biocultural diversity and knowledge traditions in India. While the clash and collaboration between what is seen as knowledge compatible with Western cognitive categories and the knowledge traditions rooted in the lives of predominantly oral communities continue to occupy imaginative transactions in India, mainstream institutions of knowledge such as schools, universities, hospitals, and courts have acquired forms that often leave out the complexities involved in the “great transition of civilisation in the Indian subcontinent”.