Sunaina Kumar writing in Atlas Obscura wrote:In 1898, George A. Grierson, an Irish civil servant and philologist, undertook the first ever Linguistic Survey of India. It took Grierson 30 years to gather data on 179 languages and 544 dialects. The survey was published in 19 volumes, spanning 8,000 pages, between 1903 and 1928.
For a very long time, Grierson’s achievement remained unsurpassed. After India became independent, the government initiated but never completed a second language survey. In 1961, the Census of India published The Language Tables, which identified 1,652 “mother tongues.” But the data for the Language Tables was obtained while collecting other census information and is not considered an authoritative language survey. In the absence of an extensive modern-day audit, the government cites 122 languages as the official number based on available data. The state does not individually recognize those languages spoken by less than 10,000 people.
Ganesh Devy was frustrated by this lack of contemporary data, especially the discrepancies he saw in the existing numbers. Since the government wasn’t likely to start on a new survey in the near future, Devy, a former professor of English from the western state of Gujarat, launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010. The name refers to the fact that it was the people of the country, and not the government, that embarked on this project. ...
The project won't be completed until sometime in 2020 but they have documented at least 780 languages and 68 scripts so far. Not bad for a bunch of volunteers and a budget of $117,000 US!
Of course, this is a general interest, non-academic, article... so... no scientific rigor here (what's a language?, for one). Still, I find it amazing that this guy could start such a project and even think about expanding the model to the entire world.
The article talks about the challenges people who speak minority languages have, what the languages mean to the cultures of these peoples, and how best to keep them from dying. It's worth a few minutes of your time to read if you're interested in the subject.