Mother Tongue Survey of India

Why in the 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.

Key Points:

What is the Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI)?

• It 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.
• Objective: To preserve and analyse the original characteristics of each indigenous Mother Tongue.

Status of Mother tongue in India:

• As per the 2011 linguistic census in 2018, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
• They were grouped into 121 mother tongues.
  • Hindi: 52.8 crore people or 43.6 percent of the population declared it their mother tongue. 
  • Bengali: 9.7 crore individuals, accounting for 8 percent.

Mother Tongue in Education:

• The National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, focuses on promoting mother tongue and regional languages.
• The new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) has recommended that the mother tongue should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight years of age.