Linguistic Diversity in South Asia
By Hannah Carlan
Language in the South-Asian context is a landscape of infinite opportunity and controversy: On the one hand, South Asia is one of the world’s most linguistically vast and diverse regions; on the other hand, there has been a constant tussle of language and power since time immemorial. According to the Ethnologue language database, South Asia is home to speakers of hundreds of languages and dialects from five major language families, in addition to colonial languages. The languages of South Asia belong to these different families: Dravidian (one of the only families that is confined to South Asia and is one of the earliest), Indo-European languages, Austro-Asiatic languages represented by the Munda branch and Khasi, Austronesian family found in Sri Lanka, and the Tibeto-Burman family. Language isolates, which are not related to any known family, include Burushaski, Kusunda and Nahali.
Internal colonization and language hegemony existed in the subcontinent before colonial rule. With the European colonialist strategy came linguistic study and surveys. The British began to record, classify, and document Indian languages through various bureaucratic projects like the Linguistic Survey of India (1894-1927), and various gazetteers, surveys, and ethnographic works. In the process, a vast spectrum of linguistic varieties were codified and divided into official “languages” and “dialects,” and these flawed classifications were inherited by the governments of independent nations in South Asia.
After 1947, linguistic data produced by the colonial government was mobilized by the newly-independent government of India in its creation of individual states based on common linguistic identity. Language movements sprang up across South Asia, in which linguistic identity became the foundation for claims to national identity, as was the case with the Bengali movement that catalysed the independence movement in contemporary Bangladesh. Linguistic difference has also been at the heart of several conflicts across South Asia, from longstanding debates over the division of Hindi-Urdu to the Tamil nationalist movement’s basis in an identity of Tamilian linguistic purity in India and Sri Lanka. Even recently, we have seen movements for the creation of new states on the basis of common linguistic identity – most recently with the carving out of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh into the state of Telangana in 2014.
Movements for the recognition of minority languages across India have been especially powerful in the context of marginalized groups, including Adivasi communities like the Santals who have mobilized political claims for independent statehood in Jharkhand based on their distinctive cultural and linguistic identities. The Dalit movement in India has taken English to be an important language to destroy caste superiority as recommended by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar who compared English to the milk of the lioness, saying that those who drink more of this milk will be stronger to annihilate caste.
In recent years, there have been efforts to refute and redefine the meaning of language diversity in the region. Ganesh Devy of The Bhasha Language and Research Centre and Adivasi Academy in Gujarat, India, which undertook a People’s Linguistic Survey of India shares that:
“In the 1961 census, a total of 1652 ‘mother tongues’ were recorded in India; in 1971, this had come down to 108 simply because all languages with less than 10000 speakers had been clubbed into a generic ‘others’ category; by 2001, the official figure stands at 122! Of these, only 22 are in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.
Most other languages are treated as ‘dialects’ because they don’t have a script, but if you think of a language as something that has its own independent grammar, and most of its word-stock governed by that grammar, these so-called dialects are also full languages. For a long time Oriya – a major language – was seen as a ‘dialect’ of Bangla, and Konkani as a ‘dialect’ of Marathi. In any case, even English does not have its own script!
There are nearly 500 Adivasi languages, some like Bhili with over 9.5 million speakers recorded in the 2001 census, some like the languages of the Onge, Greater Andamanese and Sentinelese adivasis of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands with only a few hundred speakers! And the Majhi spoken in Sikkim has barely four or five speakers now. Arunachal Pradesh alone has nearly 90 languages. In fact we documented about 200 languages about which no documentation previously existed outside of the community speaking them.” (Kothari, Ashish, 2005. The Language of Diversity )
Multilingual diversity varies across South Asian countries, as well as regionally within them. The Himalayan region stretching from northern Pakistan through India, Nepal, and Bhutan contains far greater linguistic diversity than the lowland areas of India and Bangladesh, but it is also experiencing some of the most rapid rates of language shift and loss as communities turn toward dominant languages like Hindi (in India) and Urdu (in Pakistan). UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists India as the country having the most endangered languages in the world – 197.
