Gujarat loses one language every 5 years: Linguist

Says Prof Ganesh N Devy, a celebrated linguist and Sahitya Akademi award winner. Prof Devy’s contribution in the People's Linguistic Survey of India has been indispensable. PLSI is an unofficial survey that has nearly 1,200 volunteers and is taking into account historical, political, social and cultural aspects besides linguistics. Excerpts

Why is preserving languages so important?
Every language is a unique world view. When a language disappears, the world-view held within it also disappears. Most of the languages that face the threat of extinction belong to indigenous people who have intimate knowledge of nature. And with their disappearance, the world's stock of ecological wisdom is increasingly getting wiped out.
 
What is the biggest problem faced by non-mainstream languages today? Any solution for it?
Macro languages like French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and English have spread into the domains like law, education and trade, performed earlier by non-mainstream languages. The real problem is that small languages are getting restricted in their inventiveness and are confined in their use. The solution, as proposed by UNESCO, is universal education through the mother tongue of a child.

Please elaborate on Bhasha Van (Forest of Languages) at Tejgadh, near Baroda
Bhasha Van is a preservation effort that took birth a year ago at a 10-acre plot near the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh. More than 300 trees, each fitted with a bio-sensor, will speak or sing in an Indian language each time a person passes by. The project will become fully functional in a few years.

Did you face any problems while conducting the survey in Gujarat?
All Gujarat communities have been very cooperative. Many people told me that they mentioned their real mother tongue rather than mentioning either Gujarati or Hindi during census survey. The Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has also been very supportive.

Sadly, about 20 of the nearly 52 mother tongues recorded in the 1961 Census in Gujarat cannot be traced today. I would say that, on an average, Gujarat has been losing one language every five years.

Tell us something more about Adivasi Academy's activities?
We conduct a course in tribal studies at the Academy where students construct dictionaries of their native tongues to chronicle them for future generations. Customs, traditions, recipes, clothing are also recorded. As these languages have been orally passed down from generation to generation, they have never been documented before.

The PLSI can be seen as the most important attempt so far to describe the Indian society and a book 'Languages of Gujarat' will be published later this year.

Is it true that eight new dialects/languages were discovered in the linguistic survey of Gujarat, two of which were in Ahmedabad?
It doesn't matter if a new language was found or not. What matters is that Ahmedabad has nurtured more than 80 speech communities. Do they know that there is a significantly large population of Bhantu speakers in the city? Amdavadis should be proud of their language diversity and start thinking of themselves as a truly multilingual metropolis.