In a written reply in the Lok Sabha today Shri Naik said, CIIL is also mandated to advise Central and State Governments on language matters. CIIL has stated that globalisation is not directly killing local languages. It is true that globalization is affecting languages in the sense that many languages under pressure are losing oral literature and words related to culture, especially, food items, dress and ornaments, rituals, flora and fauna, etc., but globalisation is not the cause of language death. When the speakers of a language start to realize that their language does not have a global functionality, i.e., they feel that their language is unable to take them from their local and marginal standpoint to the global mainstream they might begin to abandon it or shift towards a stronger language. Under globalization, interaction of cultures brings about a lot of pressure on languages in the sense that languages which co-exist on different levels and for different functions come together, and as they do, they begin to compete against each other for speakers. So, such languages that speakers find to be of limited potential at the global stage, if abandoned they might come under threat or even die. Under the pressure of globalization, the domains of use of some languages are shrinking with a result that many Indian languages have become threatened and even endangered. A language dies when its speakers die. For example, a language of Andaman and Nicobar islands, namely, Aka-Bo has died recently when its last speaker died in 2010.
The Minister said, the Government of India through CIIL has initiated a scheme known as ‘Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages of India’. Under this scheme, CIIL is documenting all the languages used by the tribal and non-tribal people and non-scheduled languages/ mother tongues spoken by less than ten thousand persons. The Institute is already documenting 70 such languages/mother tongues spoken in various States.
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