Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI)

About Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI)

• Mother Tongue Survey of India is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades”.
  • It documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
• As per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
  • After subjecting the 19,569 returns to linguistic scrutiny, edit and rationalisation, they were grouped into 121 mother tongues.
• According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 52.8 crore people or 43.6 per cent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue.
  • The next is Bengali, mother tongue for 9.7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 per cent of the population.

Steps to Promote Mother Tongue Survey of India

• New National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for the foundational stages of education, by Education Ministry, has recommended that mother tongue should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight years of age.
• National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) will be documenting and preserving the linguistic data of the surveyed mother tongues in audio-video files.
  • Video-graphed speech data of Mother Tongues will be uploaded on the NIC survey for archiving purposes.

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