Counting the languages of India

[iguanamon]

A friend sent me a link to this article How to Count Every Language in India. Regular readers of this forum know that the number of minority languages and language diversity in general are declining. I've learned two: Djudeo-espanyol/Ladino and Lesser Antilles French Creole. I found this article interesting. Here are some excerpts:

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.

[DaveAgain]

I've just come across another article on this The race to find India's hidden languages.

The idea of using volunteers to document the languages reminds me of the origin of the OED, that had a lot of volunteer input.

My favourate part of the article is the taxi driver linguist:

Take the state of Odisha, which has the largest number of tribal communities in India. Devy always knew it would be a linguistic goldmine for him, but he could not find a linguist there who would be able to work on these remote languages.

Around this time, he came across a taxi driver who used to work for the district magistrate in Odisha. Whenever the district magistrate used to go for a visit in the villages, the driver preferred talking to the villagers rather than sitting in his car.

"Over the years, he had mastered four languages and he had constructed grammar for those four languages and had collected folk songs and stories," says Devy. "It was material that was worthy of giving him a doctorate, maybe two doctorates."

Devy has come across several such people, including a schoolteacher in Gujarat who documented an entire epic from a different language in Rajasthan. It took him 20 years to document the epic and the entire project was funded with his own money.

"What I discovered is that it's not for monetary reasons that people learn and love languages," says Devy. "I always thought that it was only researchers who love languages, who were aware of grants and funds to support their work." Devy explains that he had not expected to find so many language specialists, especially among people who had not had much of a formal education. It was people like this whose knowledge proved invaluable to the linguistic survey.

EDIT
Re: OED volunteers

OED Reading programme:

The Reading Programme has been in existence (with some lapses) since 1857. Quite simply, the Programme recruits voluntary and paid readers, and these readers provide the OED editors with quotations which illustrate how words are used.

April 1879 Appeal