Many Indian languages have become threatened and even endangered under the pressure of globalization, the Centre told the Lok Sabha today.
In his reply, Minister of State for Culture and Tourism Shripad Naik said that under the pressure of globalization, the domains of use of some languages are shrinking with the result that many Indian languages have become threatened and even endangered.
"The Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore 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. But globalisation is not the cause of language death," Naik stated.
Under globalization, he said, interaction of cultures brings about a lot of pressure on languages in the sense that languages, which co-exist at different levels and for different functions come together, and as they do, they begin to compete against each other for speakers, the Minister said.
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, he added.
"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', Naik said.
