City-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre (BPRC), which had conducted a linguistic survey identifying 860 Indian languages, has decided to get its findings published in 33 volumes in Hindi, the spoken language of 40 crore Indians.

Giving details about the survey (People’s Linguistic Survey of India), Ganesh Devy, founder of BPRC and a recipient of Padmashree said the survey which was completed in 2013, identifies 860 Indian languages with Arunachal Pradesh having the maximum number of dialects.

Also, 300 languages are no longer traceable since independence, he claimed.

Power of Hindi “As many as 40 crore people in India can communicate in Hindi. We found that Hindi as a language has gained popularity more than English and anything communicated in the language which is popular among the masses, would have a better reception.

“We wanted to convey this message to people to preserve languages and it makes sense if it is told in Hindi,” Devy said.

“It took four years and hard work of 3,000 field scholars to complete the survey, which began in 2010,” he said. The survey holds great significance as it is almost a century after George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India that such a survey has been carried out and that too without any support from government agencies, Devy said.

So far, Hindi editions for eight states including Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh have been completed.

The game plan “The Orient Blackswan Publishers has published the Hindi survey under the title Bharat Bhasha Lok Sarvekshan in 33 volumes, eight of which are already printed. Rest of the volumes are expected to be released by 2016,” Dr Devy said claiming that this is the world’s largest language survey.

“The situation is grim when it comes to extinction of languages. In the Census report of 1961, a total of 1,652 mother tongues were mentioned. About 300 of these are no longer traceable,” Devy pointed out.

If we continue to allow dwindling of languages at this rate, it is estimated that over the next fifty years, we will see the extinction of most of the bhashas spoken by nomadic communities and adivasis, just as we will witness a large scale erosion of some of the main bhashas that have a rich history of written literature, added Devy.

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