News Excerpt: 

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), an autonomous body under the Union Culture Ministry, has proposed to conduct a linguistic survey across the country to create a ‘Language Atlas’ of India.

More about the proposed Language Atlas:

• The proposed linguistic survey across the country aims to enumerate how many languages are spoken and in which States and regions.
  • The survey would focus on the number of languages in India.
  • It would also try to know how many scripts and dialects there are in India. 
• India recognises 22 languages officially, which are part of Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution.
  • 97 % of the Indian population speaks one of these languages.
• There are an additional 99 non-scheduled languages included in the Census data.
  • According to the 2011 Census, around 37.8 million people identify one of the non-Scheduled languages as their mother tongue.
• Since 1971, languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 people have been excluded from the Census, leaving the native language of 1.2 million individuals unrecorded.
  • Many of these languages not recorded in the official Census records are spoken by tribal communities.
• Census of 1961 was the most exhaustive and detailed with respect to linguistic data. 
• In this Census, even languages with a single speaker were included in the records.
• 1961 Census of India recorded 1,554 languages spoken in India.
• Stakeholders in the survey would be the Ministries of Culture, Education, Tribal Affairs, Home, Social Justice and Empowerment, and Development of North East Region, apart from various languages communities.
• Central Institute of Indian Languages, the National Museum, Centres for Endangered Languages, and the Linguistic Departments of various universities will be the potential partners and collaborators in carrying out the survey.

Historical background:

• The first and most exhaustive Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) was carried out by Sir George Abraham Grierson and published in 1928.