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Mahesh

04/09/22 07:08 AM IST

Supreme Court Dismisses Plea To Notify Sanskrit As National Language

In News 
  • The Supreme Court dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking directions to notify Sanskrit as the national language.
SC observation 
  • SC said that the issue was in the realm of policy, requiring constitutional amendments which entailed detailed discussion in the Parliament and not in the realm of judiciary.
  • The petitioner’s lawyer invoked Sanskrit as a “mother language” from which other tongues took inspiration.
  • He repeatedly invoked oriental scholar Sir William Jones and his study of the ancient language.
Status of Hindi 
  • Under Article 343 of the Constitution, the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari
  • English would continue to be used for a period of 15 years.
  • Official Languages Act, 1963 was passed in anticipation of the expiry of the 15-year period during which the Constitution originally allowed the use of English for official purposes.
  • Article 351 (Union government to promote the use of Hindi)
Sir William Jones 
  • William Jones was an SC judge as well as a linguist and proposed that there is an existence of a relationship between European and Indo-Aryan languages, which he coined Indo-European.
  • Established the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the year 1784.
  • Jones’ was the first to suggest that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root.
  • He also suggested that Sanskrit ‘was introduced to India by conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age’ displacing ‘the pure Hindi’ of north India
Source- PIB 

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