In News: The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) with field videography of the country’s 576 languages.
What is the MTSI?
The Mother Tongue Survey of India is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades”.
It also documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
The NIC and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) will be documenting and preserving the linguistic data of the surveyed mother tongues in audio-video files.
How many “mother tongues” does India have, and what is spoken the most?
As per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
The category “mother tongue” is a designation provided by the respondent, but it need not be identical with the actual linguistic medium.
After linguistic scrutiny, edit and rationalisation, they were grouped into 121 mother tongues.
According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 8 crore people or 43.6 per cent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue.
The next highest is Bengali, mother tongue for 9.7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 per cent of the population.
Where does the mother tongue feature in the education of children?
The new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for the foundational stages of education, has recommended that mother tongue should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight years of age.
The new NCF, which deals with pre-school and classes I-II, emphasises the virtues of the mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction, saying that by the time children join pre-school, they acquire significant competence in the “home language”.
