New Delhi:
Garjan Kumar Mallick is a man on a mission. He is determined to save his mother tongue which is slowly dying out. Belonging to the Dhimaal tribe in Darjeeling, Mr Mallick is among the 350-odd people left in the country who can speak the dialect, which has the same name as their community.
Mr Mallick says he has been trying to get tribal status for his community, which he is convinced will help save his mother tongue from extinction and with it, keep his cultural identity intact.
Dhimaal is one of many indigenous languages that find mention in a nationwide survey conducted over a decade and compiled over four years by a Baroda-based language resource organisation. The People's Linguistic Survey of India has listed 780 living languages across the country, making it among the highest in the world. The list, apart from the widely-recognised regional languages, also includes many that the risk of disappearing.
Prof GN Devy, who played a pivotal role in leading this mammoth exercise, explains, "Languages survive if people who speak the language survive... We noticed that languages along the coast have been going down rapidly."
Just a few years ago, the last speaker of the endangered Bo language, Boa Sr, died in the Andamans. With her death, the language was also lost forever.
There are at least five other indigenous languages of the Andamans, namely the Andamanese, Sentinelese, Onge, Shompen and Jarawa that are still actively used in the region.
"We know very little about Sentinelese. They live on an isolated island called north Sentinel and are hostile. Anyone who goes near the island will be welcomed with arrows. A couple of fishermen went too close, they were killed. We couldn't even recover their bodies," Francis Xavier, editor of Andaman & Nicobar edition of People's Linguistic Survey of India told NDTV.
On the positive side, the survey also found that most Indian cities speak at least 200 languages. "Bombay, which used to be a Marathi-speaking city, is now a city of 350 living languages. Delhi has an equal number of languages spoken by significant numbers," said Prof Devy.
Some linguistic experts, though suggest, that we may have lost as many as 200 languages in just the last fifteen years. With the pressures of a globalised world, the fight to keep the linguistic diversity alive has only become that much harder.