An institute that can do research on teaching Telugu as a second language, train teachers to teach the language to foreigners and also create a repository of all information related to the language was needed to make Telugu a world language, said Velcheru Narayana Rao, poet, critic in Telugu and Professor of Indian literature in different universities in the United States of America.
Prof. Narayana Rao delivered the first Mandali Venkata Krishna Rao Endowment lecture on ‘Making Telugu a World Language’ at the Cultural Centre of Vijayawada here on Saturday. This is the first annual endowment lecture instituted by the Krishna District Writers’ Association. Prof. Narayana Rao said teaching Teulgu to foreigners who want to learn the language was an important and extremely essential step in making it a world language.
“Greek, Roman, Italian, French and English became world languages because linguists taught them to others. Similarly, Sanskrit became a world language because linguists from all over the world came and learnt the language to enrich themselves with the knowledge provided in the various Sanskrit texts.
Similarly there was a lot of knowledge and in the great Telugu works and there would be a void left in world knowledge if no efforts were made to make Telugu a world language, Prof. Narayana Rao said.
He said while it was easier to get access to the ancient “talapatra gradalu” (books written on Palmyra leaves), but the whereabouts of many relatively recent printed books were not known. Unless all these great works were found and made accessible for research the richness of the language would lost, he said.
