Cry for Mother Tongue: Language Maintenance and Shift

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India is the second most populous country in the world. It contains 16% of the global population yet it accounts for only 2.42% of total land. In this area people are comprising of various ethnic groups having distinct and various languages with literary or ethnological heritage Some of these languages of India are regarded as major languages; of these, 22 languages are specified in the Schedule VIII of India. As multilingual and multicultural country, different speech communities are exposed to each other resulting in language contact situations which are characterized by various degrees of bilingualism i.e. speakers of one language as well as make use of second language completely, partially or imperfectly depending on setting and situation in which they interact with the other people.

The dominant language, generally the official language of the state, there may be more than one competing language with varying degrees of functional importance in such cases, minor communities having their distinct mother tongues make use of several codes in accordance with the demand of defined situations. As for example, some tribal people in Sambalpur district of Orissa have been reported to make use of two to six codes in the different spheres of activities (Dasgupta 1979).

It has been a common experience for a linguist in India that he finds persons speaking in two or more languages or dialects. There are some special cases when people are not only speaking in others' languages/ dialects, but they are also either under the process of being shifted or completely shifted to other languages/ dialects concerned, or are maintaining their languages/dialects in social situations conducive for shifting. Through the process of diffusion and convergence, they of course, have been linguistically contributing towards the making of the integrated linguistic frame of modern India. There may be various factors such as, historical, socioeconomical, emigrational and immigrational etc., responsible for the dynamics of such processes. The linguists are specially attracted towards these kinds of processes of language shift and maintenance, under the conducive social factors, happening in many corners of the world, Fishman has said, "After many generations of neglect and apathy speakers of minority languages of the United States have, of late, become objects of more positive attention than has commonly been their lot. They have not been proclaimed national heroes, nor have they been proclaimed national heroes, nor have they been recipients of public largesse. In the eyes of general public they continue to be objects of curiosity in that their atypicaity is obvious even if it is no longer shameful. Nevertheless attitude towards them has changed. They are viewed as commanding a rure commodity, a skill which has suddenly become a valuable asset for the country. As a result, there have been a number of recent efforts to study the distribution of this commodity and to consider ways of safeguarding it" (Fishraan 72: 16).

India is a vast country with multilingual and multicultural texture. Hundreds of speech communities speaking mutually unintelligible languages are distributed all over the country. Many of these languages are not only mutually unintelligible, but they belong to four genetically different language families also, viz., Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman. Besides, there are some languages, viz., the indigenous tribal languages of the Andaman Islands which do not show genetic affiliation to any of the said language families-the genetic affiliation of these languages is still uncertain.

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