Language is a loaded thing around the world these days. In the USA Spanish as a language has become a hot button political issue in some parts. In India there are heated political fights over Hindi. States that don’t speak Hindi resent any whiff of imposition of Hindi on them. That’s why English, a language that belongs to no one in India, survives as a connector language.
But while there are political fight about English vs Hindi vs Tamil what about the other 777?
That’s right. Cultural activist Ganesh Devi spearheaded a People’s Linguistic Survey of India which estimated there were at least 780 languages in India.
GD1: I will modify that sentence a little bit. The I did not identify 780 language groups. Speech groups, speech communities came forward to claim that they had their own language. languages were alive. People were speaking. Ah, they came forward to claim that they had. And those claims were accepted
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Why does India have so many languages? It is among the top 5 countries when it comes to linguistic diversity alongside Nigeria, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
Devi says parts of the world which see more migrations tend to have more languages.
GD2: It is the South Asian history which, uh, which saw migrations, uh, first from Africa, then from Central Asia, Iran, uh, West Asia, then from Central Asia, then from Europe, uh, East Asia. And that's why we have more languages
And the languages come with mind boggling diversity. For example the Great Andamense people lived in isolation in the Andaman Islands, descended from the first migrants from Africa some 70,000 years ago says linguist Anvita Abbi.
AA1: At that time, the sea level was very low, so they walked
Their language probably is one of the oldest in the world retaining archaic structures long lost even in their mother continent of Africa. They prefix every noun or verb with monosyllables that denote one of seven divisions of the body.
For example, we just say blood but the Great Andamanese need to know where the blood is coming from says Abbi.
AA2: So the blood coming from the forehead is air. They if it is coming from this, from the inside, like internal bleeding. If you have, then it is athée . If it is coming from the fingers then it is ont and so on and so forth. So that's very amazing
The Great Andamenese live on an island so they have six different words for the seashore.
AA3:Because when the tide comes, the kind of seashore you get is a very different from the seashore that you get when the sea is calm. But when the sea recedes, you see lots of rocks underneath and there's a lot of biological whole bio bio world existing.
In the 2004 tsunami India lost thousands of people. Many feared that the Great Andamanese would be wiped out when the waves hit the Andanaman islands. After all these were primitive people without access to modern technology.
AA4: Great Andamanese had the knowledge of visualising the sea waves and and detecting the danger coming. Because if you remember, tsunami came early morning at 6:00 530. They were all fishing by the side of the sea, and they each of them spoke those words, and people ran into the forest or wherever they could find their space to go up, and they saved themselves.
So there is knowledge embedded in these languages which the rest of us know nothing about.
AA5: I mean, disaster management. If you have to learn, you learn from these tribals.They have coexisted on this earth for thousands and thousands of years
Yet these old languages are shamed for being primitive, not suitable for modernity. Abbi remembers working with Kuruk speakers, another tribal language in India.
AA6:I have seen Kuruk mothers thrashing the children, uh, because they were speaking kurukh and this and this all this all happens because of our attitude towards those languages. So some speakers of some minority languages develop inferiority complex
Languages do die. Languages disappear. And that is why people fight for their language with passion says Devi.
GD3: But raising the voice of the people is important, particularly on the language issue, because so far that is the only domain which people possess and And own, rather than the state possessing it the day it goes under the complete control of the state. Ah, that will be the last day in the democracy of any country
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW