10% of endangered languages are Indian

New Delhi, Aug. 4: Nearly 10 per cent of the world’s 4,000 languages facing ‘extinction’ threat in next 50 years is spoken in India, says linguist Ganesh N. Devy.

He felt that English posed no real threat to major Indian languages.

Mr Devy, chairman, Peoples Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) said the most threatened are the coastal languages of the country.

“Many languages are on the verge of disappearance and most of them are the coastal languages. The reason is that livelihood in coastal areas is no longer safe. The corporate world is doing deep sea fishing. Traditional fishing communities, on the other hand, have moved inwards...away from the coast, thus giving up their languages,” he said.

He, however, said some tribal languages have also shown growth in recent years.

Mr Devy was in the national capital on Thursday for the release of 11 volumes of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), claimed to be the world’s largest linguistic surveys.

The country’s total 780 languages were surveyed by a team of 3,000 people in 27 states under the study.

“I conceived the idea of the survey in 2003 and began the field work in 2010 with a team of 3,000 people. The data collection was completed in 2013 and since then, the publication process was started,” he said. The literary expert said while the danger of extinction looms large over some languages, many other languages have been thriving. “For example, Samtali, Gondi (spoken in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra), Bheli (Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat), Mizo (Mizoram), Garo and Khasi (Meghalaya) and Kotbarak (Tripura) are showing an upward trend because educated people in these communities have started using these languages for writing. — PTI

The notion that English might destroy languages like Hindi, Bangla, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati and Punjabi is not well-founded because eight of these major languages are among the first 30 languages, which are thousands of years older. Over 2 crore people speak these languages with a strong support from the film industry, good music tradition and thriving media — GANESH N. DEVY, linguist