TRIBAL LANGUAGES IN STATE LOSE THEIR VOICE
17 OF 20 IDENTIFIED LANGUAGES FACE EXTINCTION AS MIGRATION TO CITIES ERODES NATIVE CULTURE
Kamini Mathai | TNN
July 27, 2013
Seventeen languages spoken in pockets of Tamil Nadu are in danger of extinction, according to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), which will be released in August. Thirteen of these tribal languages are spoken by less than 10,000 people.
“This is the beginning of endangerment. The second stage of endangerment is when the language loses its domain of use, meaning there is no literature, cinema or education in the language,” said PLSI chairperson G N Devy. The Bettakurumba tribal language of the Nilgris is an example; while it has music, it has no cinema or literature.
Tamil Nadu also has the least diversity in terms of ratio of population to language. Only 20 languages are listed as belonging to Tamil Nadu. West Bengal and Maharashtra are the most diverse with 38 languages each. “In Tamil Nadu, Tamil and Hindi are the main languages spoken. As a result, other languages are not spoken,” said Devy.
PLSI is a country-wide, community-driven documentation of Indian languages conducted by Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre for four years. Researchers identified 780 languages, some of which were earlier categorised as dialects, and 66 scripts across the country.
The increased migration of tribals to cities has resulted in the decline of tribal languages. “The tribal population of Tamil Nadu is less than 10% of what it was in 1952,” said Devy.
For instance, Eravalla, a tribal language spoken in the Anamalai region of the Western Ghats, is no longer used by younger members of the tribe. Linguistics professor V Gnana Sundaram, who studied the language and published his report in 2012, said, “Only older women speak the language. I prepared a grammar for it but the younger generation doesn’t want to learn it. They are more interested in Tamil and English and finding jobs in the city.” Sundaram worked on the TN section of PLSI.
Linguistics professor K Rangan, who also worked on the survey, said some of the endangered languages have interesting characteristics. “The Toda language of the Nilgiris has fascinated anthropologists and linguists since the 1930s because of its use of centralised vowels (where the central part of the tongue is used), not usually done in the other Dravidian languages,” he said. “Vagriboli, a language spoken by a nomadic TN tribe of the same name, has links to Gujarati,” he said.
Tamil Nadu has 36 tribal languages, but the survey documents only 20. “The survey only documents the languages that have been studied,” said Sundaram, who works at Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.
