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Welcome. This is Endangered Languages in India, a podcast by the Endangered Languages Network in India. We’re a group of linguists who are concerned about the extremely rich but fast-disappearing linguistic diversity in India. Although over 1,300 mother tongues are spoken in the country today, there has been growing concern about the loss of this linguistic diversity as communities shift to speaking majority languages. I would love to share some official numbers about the rate of language loss over the past decades. But because of the way languages are accounted for by the Government of India, this is actually quite difficult. For example, of the over 1300 mother tongues I mentioned earlier--which is from the 2011 census of India--only 121 are recognized as “languages”, and the rest are not accounted for, because they’re spoken by less than 10,000 people. This cut off of 10,000 speakers is obviously a major problem for those trying to remedy language endangerment because vulnerable languages are precisely those that would fall below that mark of 10,000 speakers. And some of them may even have less than a hundred speakers. So there’s no way to really ‘track’ the number of people who have stopped speaking their mother tongue over the years. What we do know for certain is that over 1600 mother tongues were reported in 1961, which was the last census that collected data on language regardless of number of speakers. From there to 2011, nearly 300 fewer mother tongues have been reported as. And this is significant if you consider that in that period, a neighbouring kingdom, Sikkim, which is quite linguistically diverse, joined the Union of India. And besides, there’s been a significant growth in the population of the country as well. So you would expect that the number of mother tongues reported in the census would at least stay stable if not go up. These facts, and the observations of those who have worked with various communities suggests that many languages may be slowly falling out of use, and that there is definite cause for concern regarding linguistic diversity in India. This also reflects global patterns of language loss and language death which India leads with over 180 endangered and vulnerable languages. This global trend has led to a flurry of conservation activity related to linguistic diversity in countries like Australia and Canada, often community led. Various individuals and groups have also been working all over India to remedy this problem. But most experts agree that this is still an uphill task.
One of the main goals of our group is to contribute to these efforts for language maintenance and conservation. One way that some of us are already doing this in our work-life is through language documentation, which is an essential part of addressing language endangerment. This involves creating dictionaries, writing grammars, creating or adapting scripts for languages that do not have a script, recording the community’s daily life, social practices, and rituals, archiving all of this information for future generations, and much more. But one theme that has emerged in relation to these conservation efforts is that it’s not just linguists who are or should be interested in preventing language loss as outsiders--It's often community members who keenly feel the imminent threat of language loss. So in connection to that, we are also interested in other ways to address this “survival gap” between languages, such as by providing resources to native speaker communities and external fieldworkers and promoting academic and non-academic work related to language endangerment.
While language loss is a serious issue in and of itself, it’s also often a symptom of other types of problems. It’s reasonable to assume--and has also been the observation of many fieldworkers--that nobody wants to stop speaking the first language that they acquire from the cradle onwards. Often there are external factors, cultural, political, economic, or social, that induce people to give up their mother tongues or to view them as a disadvantage to themselves and the well-being of future generations. We have to acknowledge that this is a more general phenomenon in India among even majority language speaker communities--for instance, when they wish for their children to be English educated--and it’s also a very specific kind of problem for languages with very few living speakers. We’re always mindful of these facts. We also recognize that restricting our engagement to isolated communities and those already invested in this serious issue can be quite short-sighted, so we are also trying to raise awareness on language endangerment and the importance of linguistic diversity among a larger audience. To that end, this podcast will feature our discussions with various people working around language documentation, endangerment, and revitalization, ranging from young community members and language activists to veteran fieldworkers. Through these conversations, we hope to start a wider discussion on the various factors and mechanisms that are causing language death and ways to counter this trend. We believe that the lived experiences of the members of endangered language communities will give us insight beyond what textbooks can teach us--as can the varied field experiences of experts who have negotiated various situations and players in their efforts to counter the marginalization of languages and speaker communities.
We will also try to cover some of the technical and practical nitty gritties of field work and touch upon some of the thorny ethical issues that can come in this complex field. We hope that you, the listeners, find these conversations as enriching as we do. Although many episodes will be in English, the podcast will also feature content in other languages. In the interest of accessibility, we aim to provide translations into English and transcripts for all episodes, which will be available both here and in our official blog. You can find our contact information and all our social media handles in the description. The podcast will be published monthly. Thank you for joining us on this journey.
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