LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:2 February 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Multilingualism in North-East India

Prof. B. Mallikarjun

The British had divided their Indian empire arbitrarily into different provinces for administration. After attaining her independence in 1947, India classified the units of the union into administrable parts called states based on the majority language spoken in the territory and geographical contiguity. This process is well known as linguistic reorganisation of the states of India. The Report of the State Reorganization Committee (1955) at page. 212 had said that ‘The scheme of redistribution of state territories which we have recommended will result in many cases in bringing together people speaking a common language… there are obvious limitations to the realisations of the unilinguilism at the state level, the limiting factors being the following: (i) not all the language groups are so placed that they can be grouped into separate states; (ii) there are large number of bilingual belts between different linguistic Zones; and (iii) there exists areas with a mixed population even within unilingual areas’. Since then on some occasions the principle of major language is given a go by to the political, social and administrative reasons resulting in the splitting of some states resulting in further reorganisation.

The Indian Union as on today has 28 States and 8 Union Territories as administrative units. Popularly, Indian states based on their geographical location are identified as South Indian, North Indian, East Indian, West Indian and the sates of the North-East India. The North-East India comprises of 8 states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. The dates on which these states came into existence are as follows:

1 Assam Jan 26, 1950
2 Nagaland Dec 1, 1963
3 Manipur Jan 21, 1972
4 Meghalaya Jan 21, 1972
5 Tripura Jan 21, 1972
6 Sikkim May 16, 1975
7 Arunachal Pradesh Feb 20, 1987
8 Mizoram Feb 20, 1987

According to the 2011 Census, India has 1369 mother tongues, grouped into 22 Scheduled languages and 99 Non-scheduled languages. Indian languages belong to (1) Indo-European (a) Indo-Aryan [78.05%] (b) Iranian[N] (c) Germanic [0.02%] (2) Dravidian [19.64%] (3) Austro-Asiatic [1.11%] (4) Tibeto-Burmese [1.01%] and (5) Semito-Hamitic [N] families. South India dominates with Dravidian family of languages The North, East and West India are dominated by the Indo-Aryan languages. The North-East India is dominated by the Tibeto-Burmese languages.

For ages India has been a multilingual mosaic. It has been so built that every language or dialect under the Indian sun always had some role to play. No doubt that many languages and dialects were despised and looked down upon, and some were even banned and banished, but somehow multilingualism survived. People always had some pride in their own languages and dialects and were ready to show their loyalty by assigning some roles or the other to their languages and dialects. So, Indian multilingualism is not a post-independence phenomenon. Multilingualism existed since centuries. It has got the new impetus since independence and growing fast because of movement of people, spread of education, trade and communication. The Handbook of Sociolinguistics edited by Florian Coulmas (1998) says that the term multilingualism ‘can refer to either the language use or the competence of an individual or to the language situation in an entire nation or society’. In a multilingual state/country, in addition to the speaker’s mother tongue / language many people tend to know/speak another one or two or more languages. A distinction between individual/societal bi/multilingualism is made, wherein the individuals or society per say know more languages.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Prof. B. Mallikarjun
Former Director, Centre for Classical Kannada
Central University of Karnataka
Kadaganchi, Aland Road, Kalaburagi District – 585311
Karnataka, India
mallikarjun56@gmail.com
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