MOTHER TONGUE SURVEY OF INDIA - POLITY
News: Mother Tongue Survey of India, involving 576 languages, is ready: what is this survey?
What's in the news?
● The
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India
(MTSI) with field videography of the country’s 576 languages.
● “In order to preserve and analyze the original flavor of each indigenous Mother Tongue, it has been planned to set up a web-archive at the National Informatics Centre (NIC),” says the Home Ministry’s annual report for 2021-22.
Mother Tongue Survey of India:
● According
to the report, the Mother Tongue Survey of India is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are
returned consistently across two and more Census decades”.
● It
also documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
● The
report states that the NIC and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)
will be documenting and preserving the linguistic data of the surveyed mother
tongues in audio-video files.
● Video-graphed
speech data of Mother Tongues will also be uploaded on the NIC survey for
archiving purposes.
● It is released by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Key takeaways from the report:
● As
per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 languages
or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
● The
category “mother tongue” is a designation provided by the respondent, but it
need not be identical with the actual linguistic medium.
● Linguistic census:
○ According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 52.8 crore people or 43.6 percent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue. The next highest is Bengali, mother tongue for 9.7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 percent of the population.
Mother tongue and Education:
● The
new National Curriculum Framework (NCF)
for the foundational stages of education has recommended that mother tongue
should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight
years of age.
● The
new NCF, which deals with pre-school and classes I-II, emphasizes the virtues
of the mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction, saying that by the
time children join pre-school, they acquire significant competence in the “home
language”.
● According to the NCF, evidence from research confirms the importance of teaching children in their mother tongue during the foundational years and beyond. Since children learn concepts most rapidly and deeply in their home language, the primary medium of instruction would optimally be the child’s home language/ mother tongue/ familiar language in the Foundational Stage.
Go back to basics:
● Mother
tongue is the very first language that one hears, understands and gets familiar
with.
● UNESCO
declared 21st February as International
Mother Language Day in 1999 and the World has been celebrating the same since
2000.
● Article 350A (Facilities
for instruction in mother-tongue at primary stage) - provides that it shall be
the endeavor of every State and of every local authority within the State to
provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother-tongue at the primary
stage of education to children belonging to linguistic minority groups.