Maharashtra has 38 languages other than Marathi, finds survey

MUMBAI: It's not the language of money alone that makes Maharashtra rich. When the western state speaks, it does so in 38 different tongues and more, making it one of the most linguistically wealthy places, according to a recent language survey.

The results of People's Linguistic Survey (PLSI), a community-driven documentation of Indian languages by Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, will be out in August. And Maharashtra scores pretty well with its tally of 12 varieties of Marathi and 38 other languages spoken by adivasis, tribals, nomadic tribes and denotified communities.

"Maharashtra ranks fairly high in the per capita language rate, which is much above that of the Hindi belt, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh," says Ganesh Devy, award-winning writer and chairperson of PLSI. Hindi, Bengali and Telugu have more speakers than Marathi. However, Hindi-speaking states have space for only 30 more languages while West Bengal has 26 and Andhra Pradesh has 18 more tongues. The topper is Arunachal Pradesh, which has more than 90 languages, followed by Assam and Orissa.

The survey was meant to get a snapshot of India's linguistic heritage based on data from the last two years. The researchers identified and documented 790 languages, some of which were earlier categorised as dialects.

According to Devy, Maharashtra was able to keep alive most of its languages, especially the ones that didn't make it to the government census, because of the absence of large-scale invasions in the 18th and 19th centuries. "The peasantry could live without fear of plunder unlike in other states. When the speakers survived, the languages also remained," says Devy, winner of UNESCO's Linguapax Prize in 2011.

Unlike in Arunachal Pradesh, where Hindi is replacing many of the local tongues, Maharashtra has seen Marathi helping in the sustenance of languages spoken by small communities. "The growth of Marathi, ever since rural and Dalit writers started contributing in the 70s, has been dependent on a greater recognition of the identity for languages like Pardhi and Keikadi. This has given the languages a cultural self-confidence," says Devy, who is from Pune.

The Maharashtra-leg of the survey, which had 80 contributors, found out that the rapid urbanisation changed the styles and rhythms of spoken Marathi. "This migration (to Western Maharashtra) has made Marathi more responsive to grammatical flexibility," says Devy.

But there are areas of concern. "Young speakers no longer use terms for constellations, directions (like agneya or neirutya) and plant names that were used until about three decades ago," says Devy.

There are a few disappearing acts in other parts of the country too. "Some of the languages of communities in the Lahaul-Spiti area in Himachal Pradesh, on the northern border of Uttarakhand and Andaman and Nicobar Islands are declining rapidly. In some cases, the number of speakers is so small that humans must speak their languages with trees and birds in order to keep them alive," says Devy.

On the rise are the languages of many Adivasi communities in the central tribal belt of India. "Santali and Bodo are now in the list of scheduled languages. Jharkhand has 16 tribal languages, many of them on the growth path," Davy says, pointing to how state intervention helps languages.

Overall, the number of Indian languages has not dropped drastically since the first such comprehensive survey in 1894 by British linguist G A Grierson. But what has kept them alive? According to Devy, it is due to the failure of the Indian education system in reaching those living in the margins. "This diversity in languages is kept alive by those who don't have access to mainstream education and continuing to live in their old ways. We need to come up with a way to widen the education network while providing protection to languages," he says.