IsKannadaEndangered-SchoolofArtsSciences.docVIP

Is Kannada “Endangered”? H. Schiffman South Asia Studies University of Pennsylvania Recently in press reports from Karnataka, claims have been made that Kannada is an endangered language, and needs to have some protection in order to help preserve it. Calls have also been made by some to award ‘classical’ language status to Kannada, following the awarding of this status to Tamil, which had been seeking it since at least 1937. This paper tries to address the question of whether Kannada is actually in danger of extinction, or being replaced by some other language, examining this claim in light of what we know about ‘endangered’ status for other languages, what it is necessary to do to ‘save’ a language from extinction, and other factors that may be involved in this issue. I conclude that Kannada is not in fact endangered in any sense of the word, but that there are grievances in the Kannadiga community about the dominance of other languages in Karnataka, especially in Bangalore. Review of Literature. The issue of language endangerment in South Asia, especially for small languages spoken only by a few thousand speakers, is a real and present one, and there is some literature on the subject (Turin 2005). For a language like Kannada, with millions of mother tongue speakers, the issue has been dealt with mostly in the press, rather than in scholarly journals. An early study on this, Banakar 1982, demonstrated the ‘grievance’ aspect of this issue, in showing how Karnataka, with its large percentage of linguistic minorities compared to other states in India, was ‘showing the way’ and providing education and other services for its linguistic minorities, while other neighboring states were not. Schiffman 1996 also showed that while the establishment of linguistic states in the 1950’s did much to protect large linguistic groups, the guarantees for smaller groups within those states lacked teeth, and that small groups were largely powerless if their rights were tramp