The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI), which included field videography of all 576 languages in the country.
“It has been planned to set up a web-archive at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in order to preserve and analyse the original flavour of each indigenous Mother Tongue,” says the Home Ministry’s annual report for 2021-22.
The Mother Tongue Survey of India, according to the report, is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two or more Census decades.” It also documents the linguistic characteristics of the languages chosen.
According to the report, the NIC and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) will document and preserve the linguistic data of the mother tongues surveyed in audio-video files. Mother Tongue video-recorded speech data will also be uploaded to the NIC survey for archival purposes.
According to a 2018 PTI analysis of 2011 linguistic census data, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken as mother tongues in India.
The respondent provided the category “mother tongue,” which does not have to be the same as the actual linguistic medium. The 19,569 returns were grouped into 121 mother tongues after being subjected to linguistic scrutiny, edit, and rationalisation, according to the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.
The new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for the foundational stages of education, unveiled last month by Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, recommends that mother tongue be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children under the age of eight.
While the emphasis on mother tongue as the medium of instruction has been a feature of education policies for years, the latest push for the use of mother tongue comes after repeated policy articulations in its favour from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
The new NCF, which addresses pre-school and classes I-II, emphasises the benefits of using the mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction, claiming that by the time children enter pre-school, they have acquired significant competence in the “home language.”
According to the NCF, research evidence supports the importance of teaching children in their native language during the foundational years and beyond.
