Vijay Garg
Language is one of the basic needs of a person, just like food, clothing and shelter. A person’s first language is a powerful medium for expanding his ethnic identity and his inner potential. Therefore, the greatest expression of a person’s potential is in his mother tongue.
Obviously, in a multilingual country like India, accepting the decline of minority languages is tantamount to hindering the expansion of the fundamental potential of the people and preventing the development of the comprehensive potential of the nation. Although the debate about linguistic minority and majority in India is old, the policies made on the ground all revolved around English. Therefore, the dominance of English increased in areas like policy-making, compliance mentality, teaching, research and employment. Indian languages have had to become secondary. The harm it caused in general contexts was yet to be evaluated, but due to the same reasons, the harm that Indian languages and their variants are causing to their native speakers in digital contexts today, and it is more frightening than before. If sensitivity towards the languages of the country had been shown in the process of nation-building, Indian languages would have been in a better position in the fight against English and the new threats looming on them in today’s era of artificial intelligence would have been relatively less.
Keep in mind that the framers of our Constitution were conscious of this and to protect the interests of linguistic minorities, the right of citizens living in any part of India to preserve their distinct language, script or culture is guaranteed through Article 29 (1). Article 29(2) provides for the right to admission to any educational institution receiving aid from State funds and Article 30(1) provides for the right of all minorities, including language minorities, to establish and maintain educational institutions of their choice. It was also assured through Article 1(3) of the United Nations Charter that human rights and fundamental freedoms and dignity will be promoted without any linguistic discrimination in global affairs.
Today India’s huge population, uses smartphones. The sheer number of users, their internet consumption and the presence of citizens as content creators on social media is unprecedented and numerically decisive at the global level, but despite all this, the digital potential of Indian languages is secondary. That is why we have made it our priority to keep languages secondary. That is why despite having the highest position in the global population, our languages are not seen in digital products in that quantity.
According to statistics, English is the language of fifty-five percent of the websites as medium of web pages, followed by Spanish, which is only five percent. There is no mention of any Indian language in the top ten languages of this list. The matter does not end here, because on this foundation linguistic ability develops in artificial intelligence. Here it is important to understand the pace of acceptance of artificial intelligence. It took only two months for artificial intelligence tool ‘ChatGPT’ to reach its 100 million subscribers, whereas it took only two months to reach this number. Other Internet products, such as Twitter, took five years and five months, Facebook four years and six months, WhatsApp three years and six months, Instagram two years and six months, Google one year and two months and TikTok nine months.
It is worth noting that in this situation, Indian languages are secondary, but being the largest in numbers, Indian consumers are the primary ones, who have to accept the priority of English over their own languages. In such a situation, our situation is like that of laborers without any wages. When there are no languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of our Constitution in competition, then what will be the status of minority languages can be easily guessed. As such, they should not be expected to be a priority even in the emerging market unless the government effectively intervenes in the process of free exploitation of personal digital data.
Interestingly, artificial intelligence companies have increased their capabilities due to the digital activities of Indian consumers and now when the products are made, their customers also do the same. Many companies have even started selling their products based on artificial intelligence. The other side of this is that due to English being the natural language of the digital facilities available, the possibility of exploitation of the common man in the country, who only knows his own language, is increasing. For example, money transaction through UPI is like a revolution in the country and it has become popular even in remote rural markets. On the other hand, under Jan Dhan Yojana, a very large section of the society has been connected to the banking system, which was hardly possible before this. Have you ever gone to the bank? Use of both ‘UPI’ and smartphone is a new thing for these people. In such a situation, the dominance of English in mobile operating systems and the absence of minority languages is also becoming a factor in the expansion of cyber crime.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 65,893 cases of cyber crime were registered in the year 2022, which is 24.4 percent more than in 2021. Most of these cases are related to online shopping, ATM and OTP based banking frauds. In this way the digital absence of Indian languages This has further increased the morale of vicious criminals. Now, language is being used not only for communication with family and society, but also for giving instructions to machines. All these are undoubtedly dominated by English, but now the market has started adding many Indian languages in its second phase of expansion.
On the other hand, the Government of India has started work on a plan to develop the digital potential of Indian languages through artificial intelligence based language processing tool ‘Bhasini’. But there is a need for this. Both the quantities should be increased, so that maximum Indian languages can be connected to artificial intelligence in time. Also, people can be made aware, otherwise thousands of languages of the country will face untimely extinction. Also, their cultural heritage, the many shades of diversity of the country and most importantly, the right of an individual to live a digital life in his own language will also be lost forever.
(The author is retired principal, educational columnist and can be reached at [email protected])
