From the Editor's Desk

How to Count Every Language in India

There are atleast 780 in India

India is one of the four most linguistically diverse countries in the world, along with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The country has been identified as a "language hotspot" by K. David Harrison, a linguist at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College. According to Harrison, a language hotspot is a region with a high level of language diversity and endangerment, and a low level of documentation.

Based on data from the PLSI survey, it is estimated that in the last 50 years, India has lost 220 languages, including some within the last decade. In 2010, Bo, one of the oldest languages in the world, dating to pre-Neolithic times, died along with the last fluent speaker, a woman named Boa Senior who had been living in the Andaman Islands. In 2017, Majhi, a language spoken in Sikkim in northeast India, perished with the death of its last speaker, Thak Bahadur Majhi.

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