Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu has stressed the need for a people’s movement to protect and propagate Telugu.
“The governments are also obliged to promote the language to the extent possible. It has to be a joint effort by all the stakeholders to pass the language on to posterity,” Mr. Venkaiah Naidu said while addressing a virtual meeting on the promotion of Telugu language organised by ‘Telugu Kootami’ and ‘Veedhi Arugu’, the platforms striving for the cause, on Saturday.
Pointing to the manner in which countries such as Germany, Russia, China, Australia, Canada and Portugal kept foreign languages at bay without despising them, he said such an approach was worth emulating.
Mr. Venkaiah Naidu further said that he had been a strong advocate of the delivery of primary education in a child’s mother tongue, while using the native languages widely in the government’s administration, court proceedings and judgments, and imparting technical and higher education. “Conversing in the mother tongue within the families will foster love for the respective languages,” he added.
UNESCO observation
Languages would otherwise slowly wane from the spoken as well as literary realms, he said, drawing the attention of the participants to the UNESCO’s observation that the extinction of a language would adversely impact the cultural heritage and diversity.
Mr. Venkaiah Naidu lauded the recent initiative of Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana in allowing a woman involved in a marital dispute to voice her concerns in Telugu during a hearing on the matter in the Supreme Court when she had expressed her difficulty to fluently speak in English.
Mr. Venkaiah Naidu said some countries went to the extent of communicating R&D activities in their native languages. “Such is their passion to make the local languages flourish,” he observed.
The liberty given to the Members of Parliament to speak in any one of the 22 languages given in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution was a major step towards promoting languages that were unique to various States, he added.
Retired IPS officer C. Anjaneya Reddy suggested that efforts be made to standardise the usage of Telugu language. He said a Department of Classical Languages should be set up in the Central Universities.
Adviser to Government of Telangana K.V. Ramanachari, retired IAS officer N. Muktheswara Rao, Telugu Association of North America former chairman Jayasekhar Talluri, Dravidian University dean Pulikonda Subbachary, Linguistic Society of India president Garapati Umamaheswara Rao, and Telugu Kootami president Parupalli Kodandaramayya participated.
