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June 21, 2004 Language is the art of expressing thought. It is our ability to express our needs and desires, emotions and thoughts, that sets homo sapiens apart from all other animals. One should not equate language with speech, the physical production of sounds, as language can also be conveyed through writing. However, language is not instinctual; it is passed down from generation to generation through processes of teaching and learning. And language can reflect on itself. It is possible to talk about the way people talk. Take for instance the indigenous languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, many of which have their origin in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family or to the non-Indo-European Dravidian family. Some representation of languages also belongs to the Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan language families. The number of languages varies depending on how they are counted. The Indian Government recognizes 112 mother tongues. Additionally from 179 to 188 languages have been tabulated, and as many as 544 dialects identified. Language is generic, denoting, in its most extended use, any mode of conveying ideas. The Indian subcontinent is a classic example of this unity in dversity. There is no common language spoken on the Indian subcontinent. Hindi and English enjoys the status of the co-official national languages of India, and both are used as lingua francas in the various linguistic regions. In addition, the Indian constitution recognizes 18 state languages, which are used in official transactions. These are Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada (Kanarese), Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Meithei (Manipuri), Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu. The genesis of modern Indian languages dates back to the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, when the Indo-Iranians migrated eastward, away from the other Indo-European peoples, and settled in Iran. By about 1000 BC, the two language branches, Indo-Aryan (also called Indic) and Iranian, forked out into two distinct sets, with Iranian being spoken around Iran and Afghanistan and Indo-Aryan in northwestern India. The Indo-Aryan speakers must have encountered Dravidian speakers in northern India; the original Dravidians were either overrun or forced to move southward on the peninsula, where they are found today. The history of the Indo-Aryan language branch is often divided into three main stages: (1) Old Indo-Aryan, comprising Vedic and classical Sanskrit; (2) Middle Indo-Aryan (from about the 3rd century BC), which includes the dialects of Sanskrit called Prakrits and Pali; and (3) New, or Modern, Indo-Aryan (from about the 10th century AD), which comprises the modern languages of the northern and central portions of the Indian subcontinent. Veda is Sanskrit for "knowledge". Sanskrit was the language of Vedic civilization. Vedas, the sacred Hindu scriptures, are the most ancient literary works on Earth, at the same time with the profoundest and widest scope. They cover all fields of knowledge, material and spiritual. Vedic culture, based on Vedic scriptures called Vedas, flourished all over the ancient world with center in India. Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, is the earliest form of Sanskrit, dating from about 1500 BC to about 200 BC. A later variety of the language, classical Sanskrit (from about 500 BC), was a language of literary and technical works. Even today, it is still widely studied in India and functions as a sacred and learned language. One of the popular dialects descended from Sanskrit is Prakrait. It is one of the vernacular Indic languages of north and central India recorded from the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD. The Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrits existed in many regional varieties, which eventually developed literatures of their own. Pali, one of the Prakrit dialects, is the oldest literary variation of Prakrit. Pali, the language of the Buddhist canonical writings, is still in use in certain parts of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. The Prakrits continued in everyday use until about the 12th century AD, but even by about the 10th century, the Modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars had begun to develop. Today, about 750 million people in India alone speak one of the Indo-Aryan languages, as do more than 100 million in Bangladesh. The number of languages is difficult to specify. Roughly 35 are of some significance, particularly Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Bihari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Tamil, and Telugu, each of which has at least 10 million speakers. Despite their separate names, Hindi and Urdu are actually slightly different dialects of the same language. The main differences lie in their vocabulary sources, scripts, and religious traditions. Hindi vocabulary derives mainly from Sanskrit, while Urdu contains many words of Persian and Arabic origin; Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and Urdu in a Persian Arabic script. Hindi is spoken mainly by Hindus; Urdu is used predominantly by Muslims in India as well as throughout Pakistan. Two major varieties of Hindi are spoken; together they have more than 400 million speakers in India alone. Western Hindi, which originated in the area around Delhi, includes literary Hindi and Urdu. Eastern Hindi is spoken mainly in central Uttar Pradesh and in Chhattisgarh; it’s most important literary works are in the Awadhi dialect. (Hindustani is an older term, used less and less frequently since partition in 1947. It referred to the mixed Western Hindi-Urdu language that developed in the camps and marketplaces around Delhi, was spread throughout India from the 16th to 18th century, and functioned as a lingua franca among the different language groups.) Bengali is spoken in West Bengal and by almost the entire population of Bangladesh. Like Hindi, it is descended from Sanskrit, and has the most extensive literature of any modern Indian language. Punjabi, spoken in the Punjab, a region covering parts of northeastern India and western Pakistan, was the language of the gurus, the founders of the Sikh religion. The sacred teachings of Sikhism are recorded in Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script, which was devised by a Sikh guru. In India, Punjabi is close to the Hindi language; to the west, in Pakistan, Punjabi dialects differ markedly. Bihari is actually the name of a group of three related languages Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi spoken mainly in northeastern India in Bihar. Despite its large number of speakers, Bihari is not a constitutionally recognized language of India. Even in Bihar, Hindi is the language used for educational and official matters. Other significant Indo-Aryan languages include Sinhalese, the official language of Sri Lanka; and Romani, the language of the Roma (Gypsies), which originated in India and was spread throughout the world. The Sanskrit origin of Romani is apparent in its sounds and grammar. The origin of most scripts for the Indo-Aryan languages can ultimately be traced to Brahmi, which is of North Semitic derivation. Devanagari, a development of Brahmi, is used for Nepali, Marathi, and Kashmiri (by Hindus), as well as for Hindi, Sanskrit, and the Prakrits. Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya all have individual writing systems derived from Devanagari. A Persian Arabic script is used for Urdu, Sindhi (also written in Devanagari), and Punjabi. The southern part of India is mainly dominated by the Dravidian languages . An estimated 169 million people speak around 23 variations of the Dravidian languages. The Indian Government recognizes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam as official state languages of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Mysore, and Kerala respectively. These four languages have long literary histories and are written in their own scripts. Telugu is spoken by the largest number of people; Tamil has the richest literature, which was once thought to be extremely ancient but is now believed to date from about the 1st to the 5th century AD, and it is spoken over the widest area, including northwestern Sri Lanka. Other Dravidian languages have fewer speakers and are, for the most part, not written. The Dravidian languages have acquired many loanwords from the Indo-Aryan languages, especially from Sanskrit. Conversely, the Indo-Aryan languages have borrowed Dravidian sounds and grammatical structures. In addition to the 18 state languages followed in India, there are a dozen or so languages spoken by people in scattered pockets of northeastern and central India. These dialects are known as Munda languages. Of these, Santali is the most important, having the largest number of speakers and being the only Munda tongue that is written. The Munda languages are known to have existed in India even before the invasion of the Indo-Europeans. Linguistic scientists believe that the Munda languages are related to the Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia in a larger grouping called the Austro-Asiatic family. Infact one of the Mon-Khmer languages - Khasi - is used in the Assam Province of India. A few Sino-Tibetan languages are also spoken along the borders of the Indian subcontinent, from Tibet to Myanmar. Language is an integral part of our life. It is a vehicle for growth. It involves exploring beings, objects, events, ideas and experiences. It is making sense of the world using the meaning and context of self, family and cultural group. It is personal, social and functional. It affects our perception, degree of understanding, our acquisition of and degree of knowledge, thinking and problem-solving abilities and social skills. It is an active process learned through its use. It evolves. ------------ About the author: Mr. Soumya Maitra works as a software developer in an IT firm in Kolkata, India. He has published several popular science articles in various magazines, newspapers, and journals in India, such as Science Reporter, The Statesman, The Telegraph, Wisdom, Bioinformatics India Journal, etc. He can be reached at: soumyamaitra@msn.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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