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Kannada language is under serious threat, warned scholar and activist Purushottama Bilimale, chairperson of the Kannada Development Authority. While Hindi has grown by 66% between 1971 and 2011, Kannada has seen only a marginal increase of 3.73%, he noted, citing census data.
“We are watching our languages die in real time,” Bilimale said during his address at the Ragi Kana Santhe on Sunday, May 18. He was delivering a lecture titled ‘Language Politics of India.’
Citing a recent UNESCO statistic, he said, “92% of the world’s population will speak the languages of just 8% of the global population over the next century.” He added, “This shift is not merely a natural evolution, it’s the byproduct of deliberate policy, marketing convenience, and cultural neglect.”
Bilimale pointed out that these changes are already visible in cities like Bengaluru, where interactions with delivery workers and strangers are routinely conducted in Hindi, sidelining the local language.
While acknowledging the necessity of ease in communication in a globalised world, he cautioned, “The world may be one big market, but linguistic depletion should not be the price we pay for easy communication.”
He highlighted the precarious state of several Indian languages. For example, despite being spoken by prominent celebrities like Aishwarya Rai and Sunil Shetty, Tulu is still denied official recognition, he said. Smaller languages such as Koraga, Bellari, and Kodava are either on the brink of extinction or already lost. “Bellari, once spoken by 4,000 people in the 1980s, has no known speakers left as of 2024,” he said.
Bilimale criticised the Union government for failing to prioritise a language census. The last available data dates back to 2011, creating a 14-year gap in language statistics. “Language and population data go hand in hand,” he said. “Without updated figures, we are just guessing which languages are still alive.”
He also questioned the outdated categorisation of dialects, noting that while 19,569 mother tongues were registered in 2011, many are excluded from consideration as languages due to “colonial-era biases.” He explained that the concept of dialect has roots in the Greek tradition, “where the language of the ruling class was prioritised, and the rest marginalised,” he said.
Bilimale also criticised the implementation of the three-language formula. He noted that Karnataka adopted it in 1968, while Tamil Nadu resisted it. Northern states, he argued, implemented it selectively, favouring Hindi, English, and Sanskrit while rejecting southern languages. This uneven application, he said, “deepens the cultural divide and makes the southern linguistic heritage almost invisible to northern India.”
He also flagged a serious shortage of Kannada teachers in government schools. “Out of over 11,000 schools, fewer than 10 have qualified Kannada teaching staff, and in 7,800 schools, only one teacher even knows the language,” he said.
Bilimale also pointed out the demographic and political consequences of neglecting Kannada. “With fertility rates dropping in Karnataka and students migrating for better education, the issue is aggravated by delimitation politics, which could add 8 extra Lok Sabha seats by 2028—but at a huge cultural cost,” he warned.