Former director of the Mysuru-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) D.G. Rao on Tuesday said Indian languages have not received their due attention and care since the country has lost over 220 languages in the last 50 years alone.
Speaking at the International Mother Language Day-2023 organised at the CIIL here, the former director, who spoke on NEP: Opportunities and Challenges for Learning and Teaching of Mother Tongue, said UNESCO has declared 197 Indian languages as ‘endangered’. Various unscripted languages are particularly in danger of becoming extinct, he added.
“When senior members of a tribe or community that speaks such languages pass away, these languages often pass away with them; too often, no concerted actions or measures are taken to preserve or record these rich languages or expressions of culture,” he observed, in his address.
Moreover, even those languages of India that are not officially on such an endangered list, such as the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, are facing serious difficulties on many fronts. Teaching and learning of Indian languages need to be integrated with school and higher education at every level, he suggested.
Mr. Rao said there has been a severe scarcity of language teachers in India and language teaching needs to be improved. Excellent teams of teachers and faculty will have to be developed. Degrees, including 4-year B.Ed dual degrees, will be launched and such programmes will, in particular, help to develop a large cadre of high-quality language teachers-as well as teachers of art, music, philosophy and writing, he explained.
India will also urgently expand its translation and interpretation efforts in order to make high quality learning materials and other important written and spoken materials available to the public in various Indian and foreign languages. For this, an Indian Institute of Translation and Interpretation becomes important, he said.
Good dictionaries
B.N. Patnaik, former Professor of English and Linguistics, IIT Kanpur, in his key-note address, stressed the need for good pedagogical dictionaries of about 1,500 words and pedagogical discourse grammars for Class VI to Class VII students. These grammars will inform them about how to write connected sentences on various subjects and they must contain short texts, which are informative, educative and interesting to the pupils at their level.
“Whenever we talk about mother language issues, most of the time we talk about the advantages of education in the medium of the mother tongue in comparison with education in the medium of English. Because of this, we remain unaware of the fact that the command of their mother language of the pupils studying in their respective mother language medium schools is very poor. Taking the case of Odisha, it is said that the children of Class VII, for example, cannot often write a short paragraph on any topic. They cannot even write a short letter to their father or mother. The children studying in Class IV do not know the alphabet,” he explained.
