BENGALURU: The result of surveys on speakers of scheduled and non-scheduled languages, released by the Census of India recently, has shown that Kannada continues to be the eighth most spoken language in the country. While Kannada has been able to retain its seventh position despite a low percentage of growth in the decade between 2001 and 2011, non-scheduled language such as Kodava is recording a negative decadal growth rate.
The negative growth rate, according to experts, indicated the trend of reduction in the population of the community which might well push the language to extinction in the future. According to the Census, the proportion of Hindi speakers was highest in the country, totalling 43.63% of the total population. The number of Hindi speakers increased by 3.6 percentage points during the decade between 2001 and 2011- attributed to high fertility rates in the Hindi belt.
While the percentage of Hindi speakers was 41.03% in 2001, it increased to 43.63% in 2011. In the 1971 survey, the percentage of Hindi speakers was 36.99.
Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Urdu speaker numbers were more than that of Kannada - which was spoken by 3.73% of the population. Konkani, which is another scheduled language spoken in Karnataka, also recorded a reduction in the proportion of people speaking the language in the country.
Non-scheduled languages
While 98.5% of the country spoke scheduled languages, the remaining fraction of the people spoke non-scheduled languages - 99 of which with speakers above 10,000 were surveyed. Tulu and Kodava were among the prominent non-scheduled languages surveyed. While the decadal growth rate for Tulu was around 7.18%, it was -31.49% for Kodava language.
Speaking to TNIE, M Balakumar, retired linguist from Central Institute of Indian Languages said that the reduction in number of speakers of any language was since people adapted other languages for communication. “The survey is an indication of the condition of the language,” he said.An Assistant Registrar of Census India, under the condition of anonymity, said that the negative decadal growth did not mean that the language was nearing extinction.
“It is dependent on the number of families and speakers that have been introduced to the language as mother tongue. While growth rate for Kodava might seem alarming, Kodava had grown by 71% the previous decade,” the official added.
