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The Government of India has decided to promote all Indian languages under the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages of India.

About Scheme

• Under this Scheme, the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore works on the protection, preservation and documentation of all the mother tongues/languages of India spoken by less than 10,000 people which are called endangered languages.
• The UGC, in the same context, introduced two schemes to protect the endangered languages:  Funding support to the State Universities for the study and research in indigenous and endangered languages in India.
• The SPPEL scheme was instituted by the then Ministry of Human Resource Development in the year 2013.
• The sole objective of the Scheme is to document and archive the the country’s languages that have become endangered or are likely to be endangered in the near future.

Endangered languages in India:

• India has the highest number of languages – 197 languages, which were endangered, vulnerable or extinct as of 2017.
• Out of these 5 languages were extinct, 42 were critically Endangered, 7 severely endangered and 62 were endangered and 81 were vulnerable.
• India’s language Census records only those languages with more than 10,000 speakers.
• According to UNESCO, any language that is spoken by less than 10,000 people is potentially
• According to the criteria adopted by UNESCO, a language becomes extinct when nobody speaks or remembers the language. The UNESCO has categorized languages on basis of endangerment as
  follows:
  • Vulnerable
  • Definitely Endangered
  • Severely Endangered
  • Critically Endangered