Protecting Language Diversity: A Call for Transparency
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The ability to use language made of verbal icons makes humans a distinct species. This ability is not nature’s gift. Human communities had to spend several millennia to acquire it through an enormous amount of experimentation and an unparalleled amount of mental work. From this perspective, the community’s right to its language becomes a non-negotiable right to a legacy. Similarly, the state’s obligation to secure and protect this right too becomes a non-negotiable duty. UNESCO has been promoting the idea of language as an inalienable right. It has already built it into the charter of sustainable development goals. India is a formal signatory to the charter.
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Against this background, it appears not just strange but even shocking that the information related to language data continues to be kept away from the public gaze. The language data of the 2011 have still not been made available to the citizens who use those languages. The concealment of language data by the Census office dates back to the seventies. The last time a complete list of languages claimed during the Census as ‘mother tongues’ was disclosed in 1961. The list had 1,652 names. One must remember here that every ‘label’ that turns up as ‘mother tongue’ may not actually be a ‘language’. Duplications with slight variations occurred. Probably, about 1,100 of those labels were language names. From 1971 onwards, the Census decided, for reasons never placed in the public domain and without any informed debate about the decision, to disclose names only of those languages which had more than 10,000 speakers. The result was that the list of 1971 had only 108 language names, as against the 1,652 a decade ago.
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No one at all has ever said that we owe an explanation about the erased 1,544 languages. There are believed to be around 6,000 living languages in the world. This estimate is made by various international agencies and research bodies by counting 500 languages to India’s credit. A simple calculation will show that the Census decision of 1971 affected the fate of nearly one-fifth of the world’s languages. The 2001 language data have a mixed list of 22 scheduled languages and a hundred other languages. The list is mixed as several languages are lumped together to produce it. In 1991 and 2001, at least the data were disclosed. The 2011 data are not known even when we are now getting close to the next Census, of 2021. Does knowing or not knowing language data have any implication for the life of the ordinary citizen? It obviously does not if the speaker belongs to a linguistic majority. But if one belongs to the communities that are linguistically minority communities, the implications are far too serious to be ignored. When a community knows that its language has no future, it starts neglecting its language and prepares for a language migration, accelerating the demise of that language.
