Beschreibung
India not only is concerned with inevitable multilingualism, but also with
the rights of many millions of speakers of minority languages. As the
political and cultural context privileges some major languages, linguistic
minorities often feel discriminated against by the current language policy
of the Union and the States. They experience on a daily basis that their
mother tongues are deemed worthless dialects that have little utility in
modern life. Many such languages have definitively disappeared, and
several more are on the brink of extinction. Is this the inevitable price
to be paid for economic modernization, cultural homogenisation and the
multilingual fabric of India’s society at large?
This book is an effort to map India’s linguistic minorities and to assess
the language policy towards these communities. The author, a senior
researcher of the EURAC (South Tyrol, Italy), assuming linguistic rights
as a component of fundamental human rights, codified in a number of
international covenants and in the Indian Constitution, provides an
appraisal of the extent to which language rights are respected in India’s
multilingual reality, which takes into consideration the experiences of
minority language protection in other regions.
