The meet is being organised by the city-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre headed by Dr Ganesh Devy.

Most speakers today welcomed multilingualism but warned against their onslaught.

Rajeeva Wijesinha, a member of Sri Lankan Parliament, said people should be given the option of multilinguality but also the option of the language they would like to function in. “Our policy of exclusive language has proved destructive. In 1940s, we made a big mistake by compartmentalising education in mother tongue. That compartmentalised society,” Wijesinha said, adding that the incumbent President of Sri Lanka was stressing on a tri-lingual approach.

The case of Bangladesh was that of linguistic chauvinism, according to Zahid Akter, a literary critic from the country. “A number of languages are not officially recognised and this was creating problems. Some are even arguing that the country having the name Bangladesh is highly problematic since it recognises the dominant Bangla people and their language,” he said, adding that extra-lingual forces in the fields of economics, military, science etc. were forcing people to be monolingual but multilinguality is a fact.

Antonie Gizenga, a Congolese representative of Aide et Action, an international organisation working for preservation of languages, said, “There used to be 300 tribes with their languages in Congo. Today, only 215

languages are known. Only four languages, including Swahili, Lingala and Cayuga, dominate these communities.”

Oriya author DP Pattanayak said we need to protect smaller variants of languages also. “There are 36 varieties of Hindi but all of them are not recognised. The Hindi is suppressing its own variants. Similarly, Maithili is suppressing its variants like Angika and Buddikah and others. On the same lines, the English is suppressing Englishes of the world,” Pattnayak said.

Sudarshan Iyengar, Vice-Chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapeeth in Ahmedabad, said, “Gandhi advocated initial learning in mother tongue. He believed all the languages of the world should flourish.

However, English has brought with it the pattern of development which talks of cutting-edge technology and it is cutting the stability of our environment. To bring back eco-stability, we need to protect languages and communities which speak them and the geographies they live in,” he said.

On his part, Devy kicked off the debate with an attack on the “political class” for not considering 96 per cent of the worldview by not recognising their languages.

Vibha Puri Das, secretary in the Union ministry of Human Resources Development, said, “In India, we are extremely fortunate to have political commitment to language, especially in policy-making.” She added that languages of communities need to be made a formal part of university education so that research happens in this area.

Representatives of 900 languages of the world are attending the two-day conference which began with the release of pre-publication 15 volumes of Peoples Linguistic Survey of India carried out by BRPC. The volumes cover languages of states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir Maharashtra and others. The survey is expected to be completed by December this year. The exercise is claimed to be the one of its kind after Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India in 1961.