I try to avoid commenting on language skirmishes on twitter but yesterday some statistics shared in a tweet war peaked my interest. It all started from a Kannadiga receiving entry-pass in Hindi which is unreadable for him. The expectation was that it should be in Kannada the local language or at least there could have been an option to select the language of the pass. The rebuttal was that Hindi is the majority language (41% speaker) and for practical purposes it should be accepted as The language.
There are multiple problems in that discourse. Firstly, the assumption that a nation needs one language, one identity to gather behind is not an indisputable fact. I have already discussed that here so I will skip that. The detail that pushed me down the rabit hole was the figure 41%.
I was quite surprised to see the original census data. This percentage quoted comes from the 2001 census. The numbers aggregate speakers of 49 languages including Hindi, excluding the category ‘Other’. This includes prominent and widely spoken languages like Bhojpuri, speakers of which are fighting to get a separate language status. One of the oft repeated complaint under #StopHindiImposition is how Hindi belt or the Central Government is silencing the voice of South Indians and Bengalis by forcing Hindi instead of local languages. I wonder if we are aware that we do the same as we paint a lively and diverse language landscape from Rajasthan to Bihar and Uttaranchal to madhyapradesh in a broad brush stroke of ‘the Hindi belt’.
The latest census data is from 2011. The percentage of Hindi speakers has increased over the decade to 44% but so has the number of languages combined under the heading Hindi. To make sense of this data better I am trying to create a data visualization – a language map of what the Hindi belt looks like in its different hues. Please suggest any tools, code or any ideas you may have for map based visualization in the comments below.
The census data, the attached documents and summaries are a gold mine to understand the language landscape as well as the politics behind the data. Stay tuned to see more historical data, comparisons over the year and the socio-economical, political variables that decide the status and spread of a language.
devayani tirthali 