Linguistic Situation in India: Future Perspectives

Omkar N KoulIndian Institute of Language Studies

India is a multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic country. Though the diversities of languages, cultures, religions and ethnicities appear to be of continental dimensions, they reflect different shades of a significant common heritage and ethos. Existence of diverse languages and cultures has never been an obstacle in the mobility of the people or their participation in any socio-cultural and political interaction along the length and breadth of India.

Recognising the multilingual characteristic of the country, the Constitution of India devotes nine articles to the official Languages policy and related issues. As of now, twenty-two languages are listed in the VIII schedule of the Constitution. The Constitution protects the rights of the linguistic minorities by emphasising the use of minority languages in education and also in local administration where these languages are spoken natively.

The multilingualism in India representing a large number of languages belonging to different language-families with their numerous so-called dialects and varieties of speech, presents a unique situation of interest to both linguists and non-linguists.

The so-called traditional dominant monolingual countries are fast moving towards recognizing the multilingual and multicultural ethos developing all around them. The multilingualism is fast developing as a worldwide phenomenon with the opening up of free economy, free trade and globalisation.

Linguistics in India

Indian grammatical tradition is very old. Studying of grammar has been an integral part of education, logic, philosophy, aesthetics, and interpretation of texts. The European contact is responsible for the study of Indian languages by the non-native speakers, preparation of grammars, instructional materials and dictionaries. The linguistic survey of India of George A. Grierson, and other works initiated by European scholars created wide awareness and motivated grammatical studies in Indian languages.

Linguistics developed gradually as an independent discipline in India beginning with the first quarter of the twentieth century. The University of Calcutta offered post-graduate courses in linguistics and had a professor of comparative philosophy as early as in 1913, and a professor of Indian linguistics in 1922. Deccan College developed into a post-graduate and research institute in linguistics and other studies in 1939.

Modern linguistics has developed as an independent discipline in India in last five decades. After independence, it was in 1951, Deccan College organised a meeting of linguists and educationists with a focus on encouraging linguistic studies in the country with a view to their application to practical problems of communication. A number of Indian scholars obtained training in

modern linguistics under the Rockefeller programme initiated in 1954. Deccan college orgainsed a conference of vice-chancellors and linguists in 1959 which prepared a blueprint for the development of linguistics in Indian universities. The conference recommended setting up of departments of linguistics and suggested dialect studies, preparation of etymological dictionaries and research of individual languages.

Formal training programmes in the discipline of linguistics commences emphasising on different models. The summer schools and short-term courses organised for imparting training in linguistics focussed on the preparation of workbooks in Indian languages to be used in the teaching and learning of formal linguistics.

The linguistic studies in Indian languages and training for language teachers gained momentum with the setting up of the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Central institute of Hindi, and Central Institute of Indian Languages and their regional centres in different parts of India. With the opening of full-fledged departments of linguistics, higher education in linguistics primarily focussed on the teaching of formal western theories and models. The research work, mostly descriptive in nature applied the western theoretical models to Indian languages.

Ancient Indian grammatical tradition was lost sight of for a long period of time. With an increasing interest of western scholars in the study of ancient Indian grammatical tradition, some Indian scholars and institutions were attracted to the subject. There has been a renewal of interest in the study of Indian grammatical tradition.

We are currently facing a complex situation. On the one hand, it is gratifying to note that linguistic studies carried out by some linguists and institutions in India are widely acclaimed, and have put India on an international map. On the other hand, it is sad to notice that recent years have seen gradual decline in the number of students in linguistics. Some departments have closed down. Some are struggling hard for their survival. In others, faculty appointed for teaching and research in linguistics are assigned other odd jobs. The present situation appears quite grim.

Linguists in India have to seriously consider these problems and find solutions. Linguistics appears to have, lost relevance as a subject of study as far as the job market is concerned. The main responsibilities perhaps, lie with the curriculum. The curriculum is not need-based and does not guarantee wider applications. There is a great scope to make the curriculum need-based in the areas of (1) language education (2) translation (3) communication skills and communication management, (4) communication network, and (5) computational applications.

Language education

The knowledge of linguistics is quite useful for strengthening language education in various language teaching and learning situations. It would help in the design of courses, curricula, syllabi, preparation of textbooks and supplementary instructional materials, developing of appropriate language teaching methodology, conducting of error-analysis, contrastive analysis, language-testing and evaluation.

Translation and interpretation

Linguistics can play a crucial role in developing translation and interpretation as a systematic discipline. The contrastive analysis of source and target languages at different linguistic levels and the understanding of the semantic structure in depth are quite useful for translation. There is need to develop appropriate translation tools.

The translation tools fall into different categories: bilingual terminologies and dictionaries, encyclopedic dictionaries, cultural readers, database, linguistic corpora etc. The existing bilingual and multilingual terminologies are often incomplete and do not keep pace with the general expansion and the shift in the meaning of terms in different disciplines.

There is a need to develop a multilingual terminological database for Indian languages like “Eurodicautom’ of the European Commission's Translation Service. Available at www.echo.lu/edic , it contains more than 5 million entries - technical terms, abbreviations, acronyms and phraseology - in twelve languages.

Communication

The knowledge of linguistics is essential in developing effective communication skills among the learners. These skills are now highly valued in various organizations and industry. Linguists have to take up the area of communication management very seriously and to cater to the needs of industry and organisations.

With the liberalization, free economy and globalisation, Indian languages have to play important roles in the fast growing communication channels. The local languages are to be used as media in the communication network and information technology. There is a need to prepare software in all Indian languages to cope with the challenges of communication network. The knowledge of linguistics is essential for working in this area.

Computational linguistics

Keeping in view the advanced development in the area of information technology and modern knowledge, the area of computational linguistics is gaining a prominence over especially in the following areas:

Natural language processing Natural languages understanding Natural language generation Machine translation Computer aided language learning and teaching Computational stylistics Corpus-based lexicography Corpus-based text processing Natural language interfaces (human-machine communication) Preparation of utility packages such as spell-checkers Grammar-checkers, concordances, indexes etc Automatic tagging Text retrieval Language statistics

Speech processing Artificial intelligence and linguistics Electronic network of lexical semantics

There is a lot of scope in all these areas with ample job opportunities in research and commercial institutions in India and abroad.

Corpus linguistics

Corpora is one of the widely used resources in statistical natural languages processing and corpus-based computational linguistics. It serves as an efficient tool for researchers of various fields such as grammar writers, lexicographers, translators, geo-linguists, etc. Some of the most important and huge corpora developed for English and other languages are as follows:

British National Corpus (BNC)(A 100 million word corpus of British English)

European Corpus Initiative Multilingual Corpus I (ECI/MCI)

(A 98 million word corpus, covering most of the major European languages. As well as Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and Malay)

Survey of English usage

(Developed at the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. It also includes the international corpus of English project.)

Lancaster University Corpora (it provides annotated corpora for English.)

Relator (European Linguistic Resources Repository network includes information on the European Language Resources Association.)

The above mentioned corpora is distributed by several agencies like: (1) the International Computer Archive of Modern English, (2) the Linguistic Data Consortium provides the largest range of corpora on CD-ROM, (3) the Oxford Text Archive, (4) Association for Computational Linguistics and Data Collection

Initiative and Consortium for Lexical Research.

Compared to English and other foreign languages, we have developed a very limited number of resources in Indian languages. There is an urgent need to develop huge corpora for Indian languages. Some efforts have already been made in this direction under the Department of Electronics (DOE), Govt. of India projects. These corpora comprise currently three million words from written texts in some of the major Indian languages. It would be highly beneficial if both spoken and written corpora are developed

simultaneously. This would involve joint efforts of phoneticians, statisticians, cognitive scientists and linguists.

The spoken corpora will serve as a huge knowledge resource in various linguistic applications. The sociolinguistic variations can also be included in the corpus.

We should create Indian languages corpora and associations like LSI, DLA etc. can serve as the distributing agencies of the corpora developed.

Core-Grammar

Another new important thrust area in linguistics is typology. It is well-known that all languages in the world share some common properties often referred as linguistic universals. Recognising the universals and providing the range of variation across languages leads to typological studies. There is a need to undertake in depth typological studies in Indian languages and identify the shared formal features that across Indian languages. The CIIL initiated a programme called Computational Core-grammar of Indian languages in 1998. It was envisaged to develop a single grammar reflecting language specific characteristics. In spite of encouraging results, the project could not continue beyond 2000. This project can be taken up by linguists. This is possible with the help of hi-tech computational tools; this kind of grammar can have varieties of applications like:

a) Machine Translation

b) Cross-linguistic Analysis ( within the language family, and across language families)

c) Preparation of Computer-Aided Language Teaching/Learning packages

d) Sociolinguistic studies etc.

All Indian universities and research institutions involved in linguistic research should come forward to work in the construction and use of core-grammar of Indian languages.

Development of Languages

Various types of language resources need to be developed keeping in view current demand as a result of increasing impact of information technology. Some of the resources are as follows:

1. Multimedia packages for Learning/teaching different languages

2. Huge electronic lexicons and thesaurus which are

a) multilingual and

b) interactive (Automatic and Semi-automatic)

3. Terminological and scientific dictionaries

4. Parallel corpora

5. Preparation of manuals for translators, interpreters, researchers and teachers.

6. Preparation of Encyclopaedia of languages and their so-called dialects

7. Manuals for speech Analysts/Therapists

Interdisciplinary studies

There is a strong need to develop interdisciplinary studies at undergraduate, post-graduate and research levels. Short-term courses can be introduced in interdisciplinary areas. It would generate employment opportunities for linguists in new areas such as industry, law, advertising and Mass Media.

The Linguistic Society of India was founded way back in 1928. The LSI has played a prominent role in organising All India conferences, by publishing the journal Indian Linguistics and bringing out publications in linguistics. A few years back the LSI proposed to open Regional Chapters in all prominent cities for conducting periodical seminars, conferences and training programmes. These activities need to be further strengthened.