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August 9, 2011: Linguistic survey to study 800 languages in India, Times of India reports
How many languages are spoken in India? Chances are that no one has the accurate answer to that question: the country’s authorities account for 234 languages spoken by 10,000 speakers, and a total of 1,600 languages and dialects… there’s obviously a long way to go to describe and document these hundreds of languages, a large portion of which is likely to be endangered.
Attempts to list these languages have been carried out; a first time in 1923, then a second time during the sixth five-year plan (1980-1985), and finally in 2006 led by the Central Institute of Indian Languages. Yet none of these studies ever yielded a comprehensive result, and the work remained unfinished…
This time the survey has been launched under momentum of Ganesh Devy, founder of the Adivasi Academy (state of Gujarat) and the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre (also in the state of Gujarat), away from any kind of governmental interference. As it happens, the study has been entitled People’s Linguistic Survey of India.
The project involves over 2,000 people: linguists of course, but also authors, activists or simply volunteers. Ganesh Devy, well known at Sorosoro for guiding our first steps in India, plans on ending the survey and publishing its results on over 800 languages within 4 or 5 years. The whole outcome should come in the form of 11 volumes (one per state), the first of which, centered on the languages of Gujarat, should be issued in January 2012.
Full article in the Times of India