Speak now

India’s rich cornucopia of languages has always existed on the fringes, obscured by the vast shadow cast by dominant speech. As our fast developing economy further blasts them to oblivion, AKSHYA SAXENA speaks to the authors, activists and archivists toiling to preserve them

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“IT DEPENDS.”

That's probably not the answer you expect to a question as straightforward as “How many languages does India have?” And yet, the answer depends on whom you ask. The Constitution of India lists 22 scheduled languages. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a grassroots effort by activist Ganesh Narayan Devy, records 780 living languages and notes another 70. The last census in 2011 claims that over 19,500 languages and dialects are spoken in India. Most of these, belonging to Adivasi, nomadic, hill, island and coastal communities, live in the shadows of dominant languages. Several do not have scripts and are not officially recognised. Many, spoken by fewer than a hundred people, teeter on the edge of extinction.

We rarely hear these languages in the media. When we do, they are in the form of catchy gibberish or a villain’s menacing babble. Think of the “jhingalala hu” in Shalimar’s (1978) “Hum Bewafa” or the invented tongue of the warrior tribe Kalakeya in Baahubali (2015). These languages are often cast as primitive, and their speakers painted as simple-minded, savage or unintelligible.

“Pehchaan”is a word that Ganesh Birua, a language activist from the Ho Adivasi community in Odisha, often uses to describe the importance of language. He explains how Didayi, an Austro-Asiatic language in the Malkangiri region, is on the verge of disappearing. The youth of the community do not speak it. “In the future, children will grow up not hearing their own language. Kisi ko pata nahin hoga ki aisa koi tribe bhi hua karta tha (no one will know that such a tribe existed).”