HOW MANY 'INDIAN' LANGUAGES ARE THERE?
The number of languages spoken in India is much discussed and even more disputed. Many have attempted to compute the exact figure. What we can say with authority is that it is a very large number.
Among the earliest who attempted to count were the poets-Amir Khusrau in the courts of the Delhi Sultanate and Abul Fazl in Akbar's court. Writing in CE 1317, Khusrau listed Sindhi, Dogri, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Tamil, Bangla and 'Hindavi' as the 'languages of Hind'. More than two centuries later, Abul Fazl in his Ain-i-Akbari (late sixteenth century) recorded most of these languages and added Pashto, Marathi, Lahnda (Punjabi), Marwari, Baloch and Kashmiri to the list.
These lists are far from comprehensive but this is what these poets knew of, sitting in Delhi. Nonetheless, they establish the point that the Indian subcontinent was home to many languages, an observation that many foreign travellers also made over the next few centuries. But the actual number of languages was to remain a mystery for much longer.
British administrator Sir George Abraham Grierson undertook a 'systematic survey of the languages of India', which started in 1894. This was the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI). The LSI was published over a twenty-five-year period (1903-28) and consists of eleven volumes (in nineteen parts) of descriptions of the languages and dialects of most of British India (some parts of southern India were not surveyed). For the first time, Grierson actually came up with a number that had been comprehensively researched. The LSI listed 179 languages and 544 'dialects'-a total of 723 distinct tongues.
Each of the entries in the LSI was accompanied by what Grierson termed 'specimens. In the initial volumes, a standard passage was translated into every language. Later, a second specimen, a piece of folklore or another story of some sort in prose or verse was added. The listings in the final volumes were also accompanied by a list of words and sentences. For the final few volumes, audio recordings of various people speaking the language were also made.
The 1951 Census of India listed 784 languages. The 1961 Census of India listed a total of 1,652 'mother tongues', later pared down to 1,100 languages. The 2001 and 2011 censuses both listed 122 'major' languages-languages with more than 10,000 speakers. Since 2013, the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), spearheaded by G.N. Devy, has recorded the existence of 780 languages and estimates that there are about seventy or eighty more, which they could not record.
Given these estimates over the years, it would not be incorrect to say that India is home to something like a thousand languages, give or take a hundred or two.
LANGUAGE AND DIALECT
One word that always comes up in any discussion about language is 'dialect. What is a 'dialect', exactly? How is it different from 'language'?
In popular usage, a dialect is viewed as something of a 'lesser' language. When we speak of a dialect, we sometimes mean a language that is spoken only (without a script) and sometimes, a tongue that resembles a known language (say, Bangla or Tamil), but also has special features of its own-certain words, accents, sentence constructions and so on-that make it different from the known language.
In reality, language and dialect are ambiguous terms. Grierson in his introduction to the LSI compared it to 'mountain' and 'hill', two other terms that have no clear distinction between them.
The Hindi saying 'Kos kos par badle paani, chaar kos par vaani, par ek hai jo nahi badalta vo hai Hindustani (the quality of water changes every three kilometres, and the language after every twelve kilometres, but the Indian does not change) captures the situation succinctly. Scholars have proved beyond doubt that spoken languages demonstrably change every few kilometres or so, with speakers adding their own local flavour to it.
There is no language that is unchanged over a wide geographical area (chaar kos par vaani). That being the case, all languages are 'dialects' and vice-versa.
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