Lost without Translation

India has more languages in danger of extinction than any other, says a Unesco report. Do we care?

India has more languages in danger of extinction than any other, going by a Unesco report on threatened languages. Most of the 196 mentioned languages in peril are in the North-east, with Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland already home to seven dead languages—Ahom, Chairel, Andro, Sengmai, Aimol, Tarao, and Kolhreng. And four have between 50 and 100 speakers left. “This isn’t surprising,” says Professor Udaya Narayan Singh, who was part of the report as former director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages. “These are not languages you can get jobs with. This makes people move to languages that are powerful. Younger generations speak the language only with their parents and for in-group communication.”

Singh notes the primary challenge in language data collection is that the census is the only regularly updated reference. “It gives us the literacy rate and speech varieties, but no lists of dialects and speech varieties spoken by less than 10,000 people.”

However, there is one exception. “In 1954,” says Singh, “linguists made a demand to the home minister to include questions on mother tongues. The census of 1964 had information on all mother tongues.”

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Rahul Bhatia