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FEELINGS DIE WITH LANGUAGE
Down To Earth
|May 16, 2025
When a language dies, the entire society withers away. All kinds of knowledge about the environment is lost
Today, 197 mature languages of our country are on the verge of extinction. Ever since our education policy started prioritising one or at most two languages, our other spoken languages have become marginalised and their numbers have started to decline. These languages are not inferior in any way. The irony is that our modern society kept these languages insulated from our education, judicial and political systems. That the attitude of the government is biased can be seen from the fact that 57 languages were included as dialects under the Hindi language. These 57 languages were not given language status. All of these are rich languages like Awadhi, Braj or Rajasthani. The government does not even count the languages spoken by less than 10,000 people.
This story is from the May 16, 2025 edition of Down To Earth.
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