Mother Tongue Survey of India under 12th Five Year Plan

  by Punjabnewswire4u   

 CHANDIGARH, OCT 25

The office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India has embarked upon a prestigious plan scheme “Mother Tongue Survey of India’ under the 12th Five Year Plan.  It is for the first time that pre-selected mother tongues are being surveyed by the Census organization. A total of around 1200 Mother Tongues have been earmarked for survey. The project primarily aims to survey the mother tongues and languages of modern India with the mission to assess the linguistic scenario of the country since the geo-political-cultural scenario has changed manifold. The secondary purpose of the survey is to preserve and document the mother tongues and languages of post-independence India. Based on the 2001 Census results, the languages having less than 500 speakers are being taken up for survey.

The previous Linguistic Survey of India, often referred to as the LSI was a project of the British Raj conducted between 1894 and 1928, under the direction of Sir George Abraham Grierson, an Irish philologist. This study established 179 languages and 544 dialects of the then India. It was noted that Grierson's works could not cover the north-east (former province of Burma), Madras and the then princely States of Hyderabad and Mysore. The result was that South India was under-represented in the LSI.

The current MTSI traces the changes in the linguistic scenario after Grierson’s study.  The work involves collecting the linguistic data from the field and analysis of the collected data by linguists.   A procedural improvement made consciously for this survey is that unlike choosing local language teachers or government officials as informants, non-linguistic persons are being used for collecting the linguistic data.

Elaborating on this Mother Tongue Survey, Smt Seema Jain, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India and Director Census, Punjab said that “India’s linguistic diversity makes out a strong case for initiating a linguistic survey. Accurate information on the number of languages, specially smaller languages, spoken in the country was the need of the hour”. Six (6) languages have been selected for survey in Punjab for the current year. Field data collection will be conducted by the non-linguists i.e. statistical officials of the Census Directorate by using audio-visual equipments where the entire data elicitation from the actual informant/speaker of the selected mother tongue will be captured using videography. For this purpose, a training has been imparted to the officials where they have been equipped with the necessary skills and orientation to take up the task. The field data collected is being videographed for analysis and archival purpose.

 The statistical personnel for the field survey will be accompanied by local guide cum interpreter and videographer. For each Mother Tongue, the data will be collected from a maximum of 8 different informants ( male & female under 50 yrs,  Male and female over 50 yrs ). The interview of each informant would take about 10 days of time. The questionnaire includes 1562 Wordlist, 543 Sentence list and a Story.

 In Punjab, six different Mother Tongues, viz; Bhagalpuri, Bhaguri, Bhawalpuri, Bhagri, Peshawari and Ramdasi, have been selected for the survey for the current phase. A total of 8 samples are being covered under each of these 8 Mother Tongues, for which fieldwork has commenced in Punjab.