Owing to an obsession with English, several regional languages are facing the threat of going extinct, said Purushottama Bilimale, researcher and head of Kannada department, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

He was speaking during a multilingual poets’ symposium organised by Karnataka Arebhashe Culture and Literature Academy in Gowda Samaja, Madikeri on Sunday.

Starting from the communication between the nations to the communication between households, English has been dominating the scene, to the extent that English schools are being opened in rural areas, Bilimale said.

More than 400 languages in the country have been feared of becoming extent in the next 30 years, he said. The youth have not been taking enough care to preserve the multilingual fabric of the Indian culture.

The absence of projects which aim towards developing the language in the local levels has been the main reason for the extinction of regional dialects of languages, Bilimale observed.

The Central Government has only been focusing on Hindi and it has cleverly passed on the responsibility of protecting the regional languages to the states, he said.

Pattada Shivakumar, lecturer at Government PU College, Doddaravalanje, said that languages like Arebhashe, Kodava and Tulu are included in the list of languages which face the threat of extinction.

The poets who took part in the poets’ symposium were: Bareyanda Joyappa and Kudekal Santhosh(Arebhashe), M A Ajij, K S Kanchana (Kannada), Chammattira Pravin Uttappa and Shobha Subbaiah (Kodava), Kishor Rai, Navin Suvarna (Tulu), M A Muhammed, M A Abdulla (Beary) and Charles D’Souza (Konkani).

Arebhashe Culture and Literature Academy president Kolyada Girish was present on the occasion.

source: http://www.deccanherald.com / Deccan Herald / Home> District / DH News Service – Madikeri / August 14th, 2017