INDIA :A PROFILE OF LANGUAGES
India, like USSR is a multilingual, multiethnic, and pluricultural country. There are about 3000 mother tongues, 4000 castes and communities, and equal number of faiths in India.
The mother tongues returned in Censuses are not languages, but they are identity tokens of sorts. There are between 200 and 700 languages belonging to four or five language families. They are written using 10 major script systems and a host of minor ones. There are instances in which a language belong to four or five families, the major scripts, barring Roman and Perso - Arabic, belong to a single family. All these scripts emanate from Brahmi (3rd Century, B.C.).
There are fifteen major languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. They are Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, English, the associate official langage of the Union and official language of some States, is not included in the list. So are State Official Languages like Manipuri, Khasi and Mizo, and languages recognised by the Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Literature) such as Maithili, and Konkani. Sanskrit, a classical language is included in the list whereas many other classical languages are excluded. Kashmiri, which is not a State Official language, is included. Urdu and Sindhi, which are sub-regional languages in many States, are also included.
The modern Indian languages listed in the Constitution except Sindhi, Urdu and Sanskrit form the dominantly monolingual units of the Union. All the modern Indian languages have history and literature spanning 1000 years. All these languages are communicationally heterogeneous, each with its dialects, sociolects, styles and registers.
A cursory look at the map of India reveals three pictures. There are States where the dominant language is spoken by between 85 and 95 per cent of the population. There are some other States where the dominant languages are spoken by between 45 and 65 per cent of the population. There are some other States where no language is spoken by more than 20 per cent of the population.
India is a country of lingistic minorities. Hindi, the largest language of wider communication is spoken in some variety by only 40 per cent of the population of the country. It has between 29 and 33 recognized dialects. In Rajasthan according to 1981 Census, 33.32 per cent Hindi is returned as against 56.49 Rajasthani. Bengali and Telugu, the next in number, constitute 8 per cent each. The linguistic diversity accounts for 4.96 per cent (in Kerala) to 84.54 per cent (Nagaland) according to the 1961 Census.
Tribal mother tongues belonging to the four families total about 400. The tribals constitute 11 per cent of the total population of India. Of the 58 languages used as school language, there are very few tribal languages.
The Three-language formula is the result of a national consensus to be learnt at the school stage. It is Hindi, English and another Indian language, preferably a South Indian language in the Hindi regiona, and regional language, Hindi and English in the non-Hindi regions of the country. This is not uniformly observed in the country. English, because of the colonial psyche and international patronage, enjoys a privilege disproportionate to its speakers.
According to an estimate, there were 237.7 million illiterates in the age group of 15+ in 1981. The number of illiterates in all age groups was 424.3 millions in 1981 accounting for fifty per cent of the total illiterate population of the world.
India has 15 per cent of the world population, it accounts for barely 3 per cent of the world's book titles. It is the eighth country in the world in terms of publishing. But 50 per cent of the titles published are in English, and the rest in all the Indian languages put together. What is more striking is that while English titles are mostly non-fiction, Indian languages titles are mostly literary in content. While the world per capita consumption is about 2000 pages in the world's leading publishing countries, India accounts only a fraction of this.
As against this linguistic diversity there are commonalities which bind the country together. The cultural miscegenation of the last 3000 years has resulted in common syntactic and semantic patterns leading to India becoming a single linguistic, socio-linguistic and culture area. If one marks every ten miles from east to west and north to south one would find that there is no break in communication in contiguous point of the scale. The linguistic boundaries so merge that even if languages belonging to two language families meet in certain places they operate with a single underlying grammar and two surface structures. There are languages of wider communication such as Nagamese, Sadri and Desia which link mutually unintelligible language with one another.
India is a country of paradoxes. Here one finds one ethnic group speaking two languages belonging to two different families. One also finds a single language spoken by many ethnic groups. One finds invented and reveled scripts competing for recognition with the established scripts. One finds small languages asserting their identities as much as small languages seeking larger identities. Research in the pedagogy of first, second, foreign and classical languages conducted in institutions of national importance, and yet one finds the age old pedagogy practised in schools. It is just like Gobar gas and atomic energy existing side by side in the country.
It is evident that unless Indian languages are enriched through their use as medium of education and administration, the economic, scientific and technological development of the country is bound to be distorted. Amidst the bewildering diversities and ineptitude for bold and imaginative actions, there are portents that this evident fact is steadily recognized. The New Education Policy as well as the National Book Policy emphasize balanced development of India languages as a prelude to national development.