![]() The Act was discriminatory and alienated the Tamil community from the mainstream. Tamil was spoken by Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils (and most Muslims) who together constituted around 29% of the country’s population. Sinhalese was the language of Sinhalese people who formed 70% of the population. The Act replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language of the nation with the exclusion of Tamil. ![]() It triggered intense enmity and distrust between the Sinhalis and the Tamils. The Sinhala Only Act (the Official Language Act) of 1956 was a high point in Sri Lanka’s history. The Language Movement catalysed Bengali nationalism and the eventual separation of East Pakistan from Pakistan. This arrogance of the West Pakistan elite ignited the violent Bengali language movement or Bhasha Andolan in East Pakistan, advocating the recognition of the Bengali language as an official language of the then Dominion of Pakistan in order to allow its use in government transactions, in education, in media, in currency and to maintain its writing in the Bengali script. “There can only be one state language if the component parts of this state are to march forward in unison, and in my opinion, that can only be Urdu,” asserted Jinnah. In 1948, the Government of Pakistan ordained the Islamisation of East Pakistan, with Urdu as the sole national language. After Partition and Pakistan was formed, Pakistan became a multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic state. Pakistan and Sri Lanka are textbook examples of how stubbornness over language ruined nations. The imposition of one language in neglect of the others in a multilingual state is disastrous. It is only a primus inter pares among numerous Indian languages.ĭata | Is Hindi or English beneficial as the link language? Hindi is not a lingua franca for Indians nor is it a dominant language. ‘The Hindi’ is probably spoken by not more than 30% of the population, but it is not the mother tongue for the remaining 70%.” It presents Hindi as the ‘mother tongue’ of over 52 crore people by subsuming more than 5 crore claimants of Bhojpuri and more than 9 crore speakers of nearly 61 other languages - claimed as ‘other’ by their speech communities - from Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. In an article in The Hindu on June 7, 2019, “Language, the opening move”, he wrote: “The 2011 Census data on languages, published last year, was heavily doctored. Devy had exposed the myth of Hindi as a pan-Indian language. ![]() The so-called ‘National Grandiosity’ of Hindi is a dubious fallacy unsupported by facts. Devy.Īlso read: Explained | The anti-Hindi imposition movements in India Exposing a myth This practice made many languages invisible, says Prof. ![]() That practice continued to be followed in subsequent enumerations. All other languages spoken by less than 10,000 speakers were lumped together in a single entry ‘Others’. ![]() In 1971, the linguistic data offered in the Census was distributed in two categories - the officially listed languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and the other languages with a minimum of 10,000 speakers each. The 1961 Census reports mentioned a total of 1,652 ‘mother tongues’, out of which 184 ‘mother tongues’ had more than 10,000 speakers, and of which 400 ‘mother tongues’ had not been mentioned in Grierson’s survey, while 527 were listed as ‘unclassified’. Devy, in ‘Indigenous languages’, a UNESCO lecture in October 2008, and also in a media article, “Tribal languages in a death trap” in August 2011, has mentioned how Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1923) had identified 179 languages and 544 dialects in India. India has a harmonious symphony of linguistic pluralism it is not a disarranged cacophony. Hindi should be national language, says BJP MP ![]()
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