Over 780 languages and 66 scripts in India - PLSI

It is a year since our last post on the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), and we have the welcome news that the 50 volumes of the Survey will appear between September 2013 and December 2014.

Ganesh N Devy, Chairperson PLSI, announced this in press conferences in Kolkata and Guwahati in July. As the report in The Hindu said: "There are over 780 languages and 66 different scripts in India. Arunachal Pradesh is the richest among the States with 90 languages.... Researchers found that Assam with 55 languages, Gujarat 48, Maharashtra 39, and West Bengal 38 are among the most linguistically diverse States.... The survey, Dr. Devy said, has revealed that the north-eastern parts of the country have one of the highest per capita language densities in the world."

A report in The Telegraph informs us that there are "130 living languages, including variants, in five states of the Northeast, some of them probably spoken by only four or five people".

Reflecting on this, another report quotes Devy as saying, "While it surely is a fact to celebrate the diversity of the country, the sad part is we have lost nearly 250 languages in the last 50 years or so."

Indeed, as Dr Devy remarked in a February 2013 interview: "While PLSI would easily be the world’s largest language survey, let me tell you that I am not proud of doing it. It was like going for rehabilitation work after an earthquake. It should have been done 50 years ago....

"We called a confluence of language experts in Vadodara in 2010 and called the place ‘ground zero’. This term (ground zero) was widely used by victims of the nuclear attacks in Japan in World War II. India, and the world, is becoming a graveyard of languages and we wanted to draw attention to that."

Nitobe Symposium on Languages and Internationalization in Higher Education

The 6th Nitobe Symposium is on "Languages and Internationalization in Higher Education: Ideologies, Practices, Alternatives", July 18-20, 2013, at the National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.

From the Symposium website: "The symposium will be particularly concerned with the expanding use of English-medium instruction in higher education and the repercussions, positive and negative, of this development. The symposium will also examine alternative approaches."

Organized by the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CRD),  the Symposium's multilingual Background Papers themselves are useful reading. And here is the list of Paper Summaries.

• Dimitra Karoulla-Vrikki Karoulla-Vrikki, Dimitra (Cyprus), “English-medium instruction in higher education in Cyprus”.

• Conchúr Ó Giollagáin Abstract: Conchúr Ó Giollagáin

• Jala Garibova: Languages, Power and Incentives:The Foreign Language Policy of Universities in Azerbaijan

• Probal Dasgupta: Barataj diskursoj kaj la universitata internaciigointernaciigo/Indian discourses and academic internationalization.

• Adelheid Hu: Language policy, teaching and learning practices, disciplinary traditions: The case of the trilingual University of Luxembourg.

• Jane Edwards: Languages and Internationalization in Higher Education: a U.S. Perspective

• Usui Hiroyuki: China’s two-fold linguistic policy: English today, Chinese tomorrow?

• Kristin Tytgat: More English in Higher Education? New Language Requirements for Staff in Flemish Universities

• Alastair Walker: Teaching a minority language and related multilingualism in a globalised world: The case of North Frisian at the University of Kiel, Germany

• Jouko Lindstedt: English in Finnish Universities as a Means of Recruiting Teachers and Students

• Clive Earls: English-Medium Higher Education in Germany

• Jukka Pietiläinen: Languages of scientific publishing in Finnish Universities

• Christer Kiselman: Language choice of Uppsala University

• Kimura Goro Christoph: The increase of English-medium instruction in Japanese universities

Test scores and future economic success

Last year's first post was called "India's crisis in learning" and cited the country's poor performance in the international education-comparison tests PISA.

Now, writing in New Scientist MacGregor Campbell tells us that "the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA)."

Worse, "[i]n many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure"! Summarizing a 2007 study, he says,

Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless".

Which is not to say that math, science and language skills are not important. But perhaps we should stop fixating on performance in these tests. For, as Cambell notes:

in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.

Of course, none of this is grounds for any complacency about the education system in India! Let us see what this January's ASER report brings.

Linguistic minorities report

The Government of India's Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities submitted its 48th report (PDF) in July 2012. The Commissioner circulated a questionnaire on the implementation of "safeguards" for linguistic minorities. All but five states replied to the questionnaire. Another query was also sent to states and government departments asking what action had been taken on the recommendations of the previous report. Thirteen replies were received; 26 did not reply.

Chapter 37 of this report (p. 275 onwards) gives "Findings & Observations at a Glance". It takes each "safeguard" in turn and lists where it has been fully or partially implemented; where it needs to be implemented; and where "no specific information" has been provided.

The first safeguard, for instance, is "Facility for Instruction in Mother Language at Primary Stage of Education". The report tells us that it has been implemented in Andhra Pradesh, Assam and Delhi; "implemented in parts" in 13 other states; needs to be implemented in 10 more; while nine have not given any information.

While most states have returned the questionnaire, they seem to have answered only some of the questions about the safeguards that they are actually implementing. Thus, there are many gaps in information.

A previous commissioner has recommended (DOC) that the Indian census should record the names of all languages -- not just those with more than 10 000 speakers. Indeed, he recommended the abolition of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution altogether. One result of the way the census currently counts is that under the rubric Hindi, for example, the 2001 census lists 49 "mother tongues". It then has a category called "Others" with as many as 14.8 million speakers. They all speak variants of Hindi, but each variant has less than 10 000 speakers. So their mother tongues are not mentioned.

The recommendations of this report (chapter 38) do not address the census issue. However, this report acknowledges the increasing mobility of urban populations and the increasing multilingualism of our cities. Clearly we need to know more reliably who speaks what, and design our policies accordingly.

Inari Sami reborn

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (some of whose talks are here) sends this information on the "seriously endangered" language Aanaar Saami (which the English Wikipedia calls Inari Sami).

Suvi Kivelä, journalist and director of the Aanaar Saami archives, has made a 9-minute documentary about her mother-in-law and her two sons and the revitalization of the Aanaar Saami language (which has some 350 speakers). The documentary "Reborn" in now on YouTube with English subtitles.

Tove tells us that everyone in the documentary is speaking Aanaar Saami. The only ones who speak Finnish are the father of Suvi's children and the priest. We also learn that the project has now "produced" a Saami-speaking priest too.

Hopefully, the project will be useful for other indigenous groups as well.

Indian survey records 630 languages so far

The People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) has already listed and described 630 languages in 27 states of the country. The Survey's Chairperson, Ganesh Devy, reported this at a workshop held here in Hyderabad on 31 May 2012. We have met Dr Devy and PLSI before in this blog.

In the workshop there were about 10 speakers of various indigenous (tribal) languages of Andhra Pradesh. They have been working with the state wing of the national universal elementary education program, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Working with indigenous communities, these resource-persons and their colleagues have collected information on 16 indigenous languages, which they have rendered into Telugu. The task of the 10-or-so English-speaking Telugus in the workshop is to translate the Telugu information into English. The PLSI team will later translate into Hindi as well. Thus PLSI envisages diverse information on Indian languages in the language itself, the dominant regional language, Hindi, and English. (The PLSI website lists publishers in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Odia.)

The SSA resource-persons raised many issues regarding multilingual education (MLE). Several spoke of the apathy in the bureaucracy, once one leaves the village-level and goes upwards through the education department: unfulfilled promises to develop learning materials in the mother tongue; warehouses filled with textbooks which have not been distributed to the schools; primary schools teaching in Gondi side-by-side with schools teaching in Telugu -- but the examinations are only in Telugu!

They said that the range of official attitudes to MLE ranged from ignorance to indifference to hostility. Indeed, Dr Devy remarked that "even in the highest circles of bureaucracy in Delhi" he has heard MLE being described as "mother language education"! But Dr Devy also announced that for the first time, the Government of India has set up a committee specifically for education of indigenous peoples.

He said that the PLSI data will help policy-makers a great deal.

Mother Language Day 2012

Nelson Mandela once said that "if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart". Thus, Irina Bokova, Director-General of Unesco, begins her message (links to PDFs in the official languages of the UN) for this year's International Mother Language Day (IMLD), celebrated on 21 February every year.

The theme for IMLD 2012 is "Mother tongue instruction and inclusive education". Prominent in this year's celebration is the crucial role mother-tongues play in the right to education.

Among the interesting resources on the Unesco page are an article "Nisha's right" from The Kathmandu Post; an interview with Colette Grinevald: "Speaking your mother tongue is not a disability!"; as well as the following brief podcasts from SOAS radio (a resource well worth bookmarking):

• in English: Peter Austin on "Bangladesh, Australia and the importance of Mother Language Education"
• in Russian: Elena Giniotyte on "Archi, an Endangered Language in the Caucasus"
• in Mandarin: Lianhong Yo on "Language and Nation Building in Singapore"
• in Arabic: Samah Bushra Yousef on "Bilingual Education in Burkina Faso"
• in Portuguese: Helena De Moraes Achca on "Bilingual Education in Bolivia"