Indian languages lost

This video is called THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA.

From Prensa Latina news agency:

India Has Lost 220 Languages over Past 50 Years

New Delhi, Aug 11. India has lost 220 languages over the past 50 years, one-fifth of all languages spoken in the country, according to a study from the Bhasha Research and Publication Center.

In 1961, Indians spoke 1,100 languages, but nearly 220 have disappeared, said Ganesh Devy, a writer and coordinator of the so-called People”s Linguistic Survey of India, carried out over two years from 2011.

“We have found 780 languages and must have missed about 100 or so. That makes it close to 880 languages. The rest have disappeared. It’s a sad loss,” said Devy.

India is one of the countries in the world with a great linguistic diversity. Seventy-four percent of the population speaks languages that belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and 23 percent speaks languages from the Dravidic family. The rest of the population communicates through languages or dialects from the Austro-Asian and Chinese-Tibetan families.

Most lost languages were used by nomadic communities scattered across the country, accounting for five million Indians.

“The main reasons for the disappearance of these languages are a lack of recognition, displacement of communities, the absence of a livelihood option for speakers and stigma against what are considered ‘under-developed’ mother tongues,” he said. “The absence of a policy on language conservation completed the process,” he added.

The survey aims to study the evolution of languages in India and to motivate official institutions and the communities to preserve them.

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