Languages provide a window into the rich cultural diversity that we have in India. These languages also are a unique way of mapping trends across the country. According to the Schedule VIII

of the Constitution of India, twenty-two languages were accorded the status of official languages, including English and Hindi. Since the independence of India in 1947, certain languages

have received considerably higher political patronage which has allowed them to survive or thrive. This is due to myriad political and social movements across the country. For instance, the

Sangh Parivar’s patronage and mission of spreading the Hindi language, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s ideology of promoting the Tamil language come to mind. Speakers of the dominant

endangered or vulnerable. There is an urgent need to document these languages and map the demography of its speakers in order to revitalise the rich cultural heritage of these groups, many

of which are indigenous or tribal. They are being swept away in the vast juggernaut of Indian Imperialism. This data journalism project is an initial attempt to document the geographical

spread of these endangered languages in India. CLASSIFICATION OF ENDANGERED LANGUAGES For my research, I have drawn primarily on languages listed as ‘endangered’ under the UNESCO’s study

titled, ‘Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger’[1], adding more languages reported in National census[2], the Ethnologue online database[3], the published work of George van Driem[4],

Glottolog [5] for its geo-spatial mapping of world languages. While the list from UNESCO contained well over a 100 languages, it came without any information about these languages in detail

such as the language family, scripts it uses or even the ethnicity of the people who speak these languages and only mentioned the number of native speakers in 2010 and the degree of

endangerment. To broaden my research, I decided to classify my data according to the following categories. * Language Family, Ethnicity of native speakers and Scripts — These attributes were

added to understand the demographic of the language and its origins. These attributes helped also making inferences about the kind of languages that face extinction. The research was done

through a multitude of academic papers and books. * Number of native speakers in India — I further have added data from Indian census to chart the population of native speakers across the

last 40 years (From 1971 to 2011) to understand the trends in growth/decline of these languages. * Geotagging and ISO639–3 Codes — Furthermore, the languages were geo-tagged using the help

of Glottolog which has assimilated data on languages around the world and has geo-tagged them as well. One of the questions that arose while trying to classify these languages was to

understand what would make a language endangered. While this debate has been raging among linguists who differ in their assessment of how the degrees of endangerment can evaluated, most do

agree in the definition of what an endangered language is; a language is endangered if it is not being passed down to younger generations. UNESCO in its research has established 5 degrees of

endangerment that ‘may be distinguished with regard to intergenerational transmission’: * Safe: The language is spoken by all generations. The intergenerational transmission of the language

is uninterrupted. * Vulnerable: Most, but not all, children or families of a particular community speak their parental language as their first language, but this may be restricted to

specific social domains (such as the home, where children interact with their parents and grandparents). * Definitely endangered: The language is no longer being learned as the mother tongue

by children in the home. The youngest speakers are thus of the parental generation. At this stage, parents may still speak their language to their children, but their children do not

typically respond in the language. * Severely endangered: The language is spoken only by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may still understand the language,

they typically do not speak it to their children, or among themselves. * Critically endangered: The youngest speakers are in the great-grandparental generation, and the language is not used

for everyday interactions. These older people often remember only part of the language but do not use it on a regular basis, since there are few people left to speak with. * Extinct: There

is no one who can speak or remember the language. I have used 5 of these categories to enlist 189 languages that are under endangerment in India. They are color-coded across the map for

identification. Of these, 58 have been classified as _critically endangered, _7 are listed as _severely endangered_, 44 as _definitely endangered_, 72 are _vulnerable _and 8 have gone

_extinct_. However, because reliable data concerning both their health and the number of speakers are not always available for many of the smaller languages, these classifications should be

treated as provisional. In addition, a few languages classified as vulnerable might more accurately be described as ‘stable but potentially endangered’, as suggested by Krauss[6]. There are

though many complexities and implications which are a part of this definition. A prime example of this is when a language maybe being used exclusively at home but not being taught in the

schools. In a lot of these cases the language does not have its own writing script and oral transmission is the primary source of communication. These languages might also be the sub strata

of society in India whose forced migration to seek employment may require them to move towards a larger speech circle and be unable to retain their everyday use of their native languages.

This happens across the Northeast part of the country where Assamese and Bengali have seen to take precedence over the endangered languages for the same reasons. Though these circumstances

vary from region to region but a common thread running through those discussions is that endangered languages lack a social status — even for their own native speakers; they also lack

economic power and independence; they lack a stable infrastructure; and in some cases they also lack literacy. That is why it has been important to locate and publicize those languages.

DIVERSITY India is home to several hundred languages and the number goes up into the thousands if you add in the dialects making it one of the most intricate ethnolinguistic countries in the

world.[7] While it is dominated by the Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindu, Bengali, Urdu and Marathi, a considerable population speaks Dravidian languages in the south. According to

Articles 344(1) and 355 of the Indian constitution, 8thSchedule officially recognizes Twenty-two languages out of these thousands. These official literary scripted languages are not

threatened at all as they all benefit from some sort of political patronage. Even though these endangered languages are spoken in every state in India, but these languages that face

endangerment are largely grouped along the Himalayan belt extending down to the north-east corridor. These primarily belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages spoken by small

communities based in the hilly terrain of the north east of India. With a few exclusions, these endangered languages are deprived of any official status, a literary heritage, adequate

political backing and most rely on a borrowed script such as Latin or Devanagari. Several Dravidian and a few Indo-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic and Kra-Dai languages spoken mostly in central,

eastern and north-east India are also under threat. These endangered languages include two dozen Austro-Asiatic languages spoken in eastern India and the Nicobar Islands, about one dozen

Tibeto-Burman languages in the western Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, nearly two dozen Dravidian languages in central and South India, and finally about two dozen

Indo-Aryan languages in central and northern India. DECLINE The explanation for the decline of these languages and their possible extinction is not primarily linguistic. These languages have

rich and complex grammar with considerably large vocabularies. The primary reason for their decline comes from these languages being looked at as being unfashionable, having lost

transmission at home and having very limited support from the political system. In India, where languages and their scripts establish regional identities and political vote banks, these

small unofficial languages, a lot of whom are without a script of their own are at a severe disadvantage. A language can only gain official status when it is entered into the 8th Schedule of

the Indian constitution. While the Constitution only had listed fourteen official languages when it was adopted in 1950, another eight languages have been added to that list through

amendments. There is also an inquisition into added 42 languages to list as currently only two endangered languages are a part of this list which have been granted official status, Meithei

and Bodo. Meithei is uncharacteristic since it is a mixture of Tibeto-Burman and Indic and used its own script, which is now lost and Eastern Nagari has been used since the 18th century,

founding large literary history. Bodo was appointed the status of an official language in 2003, as part of a political cooperation to bring a close to the uprising in Assam. State backing

for endangered languages is being further established at the level of individual states, this is vital as states are free to choose the medium of instruction and official use in local

governments. By law, several endangered languages are sanctioned for use in state (or district-level) schools, but few are regularly heard in the classroom. While some of the large,

vulnerable languages are taught at school, the great majority of them do not enjoy even this meek status in their own communities. So while Indian states are permitted to implement one or

more languages as the official language(s), and several in the north-east have selected a vulnerable language used by a big fraction of the state’s population as one of their official

languages (Meithei in Manipur, Bodo in Assam, Kokborok in Tripura, Mizo in Mizoram, Garo and Khasi in Meghalaya). Though this step has produced a difficult scenario in the states of Nagaland

and Arunachal Pradesh where no solitary native language is spoken by an adequately large fraction of the populace to brand it as an acceptable official state language. As a consequence of

this, English has been granted this status in Nagaland while Arunachal Pradesh has settled for Hindi for their state. These choices also echo a craving to claim an identity of

Indian/Hinduism which the centre government has been actively trying to promote. In Nagaland, some Naga languages are taught at school, but mostly in rural areas. A lingua franca, Nagamese,

is widely used in urban contexts where speakers of mutually unintelligible languages mix together. However, because Nagamese is a pidgin, deriving mostly from Assamese and Hindi, some people

see it as representing an unwelcome degree of Indian influence. English, which is often part of the Christian Naga identity, is thus the default position. In Arunachal Pradesh, about

two-thirds of the total population of just over 1 million people are mother-tongue speakers of one of approximately thirty endangered languages, all of which are Sino-Tibetan (with the

exception of Khampti, which is Kra-Dai). The other third of the state’s population are recent immigrants whose mother tongue is an Indo-Aryan language (mostly Hindi, Bengali or Assamese) and

who work as civil servants, businesspeople, shopkeepers and labourers. With Christian conversions and English-language education far less advanced than in Nagaland, Hindi was chosen as the

state’s official language in 1987. Assamese had been the medium of instruction until the 1970s, but current official policy is that English should be used at all levels of education. In

practice, however, Hindi dominates in schools, as it does in government offices. This being a part of the larger effort of the central government to promote and make Hindi the language of

the country. Another debilitating fact for a lot of these threatened languages is that they lack a possible script. While scripts have been invented (rediscovered and revived) for many

languages, very few are used with any regularity in schools or public life. Many of these languages appear in print (in Roman, Devanagari or an invented script) as Christian prayer-books and

biblical translations, particularly in the north-east; and this usage may prove to be a lifeline for them. Some threatened languages also appear in the classroom, but they are typically

pushed aside in favour of English- and Hindi-language schoolbooks printed in the Latin and Devanagari alphabets. Though a lack of a script does not necessarily mean illiteracy. Data for

literacy can be deceptive as first, the Indian census reports the ability to read and write in any language and, second, such ability is self-reported and not tested. Thus, the 2001 literacy

rates for north-east India are impressive: 88 per cent for Mizoram; over 65 per cent for Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur; 55 per cent for Arunachal Pradesh; and 65 per cent for India as a

whole. But they actually reflect competence in Hindi (and/or English and/or Bengali), while speakers of endangered languages remain illiterate in their mother tongues. Another, poorly

studied, dimension of endangerment in India is that loss occurs in stages, as different variations of speech within that language disappear. Since most threatened languages in the region are

spoken by people who practise (or practised) some form of a local religion other than Hinduism, Buddhism or (now) Christianity, many of these languages have a speech variety used by ritual

specialists to address spirits. Defined by its esoteric vocabulary, rather than grammar, this ritual speech (or oral poetry) is usually the first level of language to disappear. A second

vulnerable speech variety is that used in traditional storytelling because it relies on allusions and tropes, characters and ideas, which belong to a mythic world that is replaced by

modernization. CONCLUSION The risk to many vulnerable languages in India is difficult to judge. In many cases, the transference of languages across generations is healthy. A large number of

children are taught their mother tongues at home and speak it within a small circle. Though as at school and through the media, however, they also are encouraged to cram Hindi, English,

Bengali (or another dominant regional language); and some children sometimes speak these languages among themselves and with outsiders. Even when the mother tongue is still used quite

extensively, it is generally relegated in the bi or trilingualism that is the norm throughout the country, especially among mother-tongue speakers of endangered languages. As the decline of

languages is a process that takes hundreds of years to age out, most of these vulnerable languages will probably survive, and will continue to be learned by the majority of children as their

mother tongue, for several decades into the future. Others, however, will surely decline, some will hover near extinction and a few will have disappeared by another century. People who

speak many of these threatened languages in India tell a story about how they once had, but then lost, a script. Though it is not certain at all that the future generations will be hold

enough expertise of their native languages to even tell the story of their own language loss in the future. [1] UNESCO. 2011. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Online version:

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001870/187026e.pdf(Accessed 24 October 2018.) [2] MHRD, 2011. Online version: http://censusindia.gov.in/2011Census/C-16_25062018_NEW.pdf(Accessed 24

October 2018) [3] Gordon, R. G. (ed.). 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, Tex., SIL International. Online version: http:// http://www.ethnologue.com (Accessed 24

October 2018.) [4] van Driem, G. 2007. South Asia and the Middle East. C. Moseley (ed.), Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. London/ New York, Routledge [5]

https://glottolog.org/ [6] Krauss, M. 2007. Classification and terminology for degrees of language endangerment. C. Moseley (ed.), Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages.

London/New York, Routledge, pp. 1–8. [7] Mother Tongues of India According to the 196.1 Census, _Language in India_. Retrieved October 26, 2018.