Linguistic Diversity of India

A recent census related data indicates that around 19500 languages or dialects are spoken as mother tongue in India. 121 languages are there with more than 10000 speakers. Yet only 22 languages are considered as scheduled languages. i.e, the languages with constitutional validity and backing. There is not a single country in the world that has this level of linguistic plurality. The dialects vary at the district level. In fact for a large state, the dialect at one part of state would be so different from the diametrically opposite part of the same state. The three language families, Dravidian, Indo-European, Tibeto-Burman are unrelated. Almost all Indians understands atleast two languages from unrelated families. But this vast difference in linguistic variety warrants a lot of fundamental research in terms of language origin and development scientifically. But unfortunately these kind of studies and research interests finds no takers in India. Tamil, a classical language is widely regarded as one of the oldest surviving languages still being spoken. Yes there are wide range of initiatives promoted by TN Govt to popularize Tamil language and literature. This initiatives must happen at the central govt level to have some kind of international impact.

Ideally India needs a ministry solely dedicated for resolving the inter language conflicts and promote inter language studies. A recent trend of cultural homogenization of all Indians is a far fetching idea. As mother tongue gets hooked to one’s brain unintentionally and cant be undone, language level homogenization won’t work in theory. I strongly suspect the peculiarities of a language like the grammatical structure, properties of words, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc have a deep impact on ones intellect. Is it only me who feels that some city names like Antwerp/Amsterdam/Klagenfurt feels more sonorically pleasing or aesthetic sounding than any city names in India? Does it have anything to do with the fact that English is my L2? Though the language related constructs gets tied to language independent primitive hooks, it probably could impact ones language independent analytical reasoning skill. Melodic structure of music impacts the spatial reasoning of the brain. Likewise language could impact too. When speaking in our secondary language, we tend to have a more formal objective viewpoint. The more nuanced, unintelligible, unexpressable component of our mother tongue gets filtered out.

India is a huge lab of unrelated language family speaking specimens. We need to have scientists coming to exploit this rare category. And definitely a goldmine for natural language interface researchers.