INDIA'S RACE TO SAVE ENDANGERED TRIBAL LANGUAGES

India works to preserve endangered tribal languages like Toda through documentation, AI tools, and education policies, aligning with global efforts to protect indigenous cultures and linguistic diversity amid rising digital and cultural threats.

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"Our family god called Kuladheivam in Tamil, has a temple in our village called poliwof," said the 66-year-old Kurtaz Vasamalli, who lives in the Nilgiri hills near Ooty.

"We believe that the divine power comes to our villages from the temple...there is no idol worship." The hills, which are renowned for tea and coffee plantations, are considered sacred by the Toda tribe, who have lived there for thousands of years. The pastoral community believes that their gods and goddesses lived among them once and became a part of the sacred landscape over time.

Vasamalli knows her oral traditions through her native language Toda. Toda is an endangered protoSouth-Dravidian language which evolved in isolation after splitting from South Dravidian (like Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam). The Toda people number a few thousand now. Vasamalli is one of the elders of the community striving to preserve her traditional oral heritage.

Vasamalli most recently worked with the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL) team being implemented by the Mysuru-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) under the Ministry of Education. SPPEL works to document and archive the country>s endangered languages-languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 speakers or languages not previously studied linguistically.

SPPEL aims to preserve and revitalize endangered languages for future generations by conducting field work and documenting the grammar and words of languages, creating documentaries, bi-lingula/tri-lingual dictionaries, pictorial glossaries and ethno-linguistic profiles, and uploading the documentation work, including audio files, to online repositories for worldwide access.

Currently, SPPEL has identified 117 endangered languages, and is working toward documenting about 500 lesser-known languages in the future.