India has a rich heritage in terms of languages and every language spoken, even by the most remote areas, is respected by the Constitution through the likes of Article 29 and Schedule VIII. “History demonstrates that, from times immemorial, India has been a multilingual country, each language having a certain region in which it was supreme, but none of these regions truly constituted unilingual kingdom or principality.”

In ancient India, Sanskrit was the most prevalent language especially during the period of Aryans who introduced it. There are evidences which show that Sanskrit was spoken by elite while the ‘low order’ people used Pali as a means of communication. With the arrival of Islamic rulers, the language became Persian in most of the regions of the then India. At the regional level, local dialects became popular which borrowed words from other main prevalent languages like Persian, Turkish, Arabic, etc. Gradually Urdu developed as a confluence of Persian speaking classes/foreigners and Sanskrit speaking locals.

A few years later (1837), the British settled in India and English language overpowered Persian. Hindi and Urdu started to be used in courts for local residents. Initially, the British experimented with vernacular languages in courts and other Indian matters but later they found it more convenient to switch over to English.

The then prevalent classical languages-Sanskrit, Arabic and other indigenous languages suffered a drastic blow with the introduction of ‘Minute of 1835’ by Thomas Babington Macaulay as it injected English language in the Indian system and it trained the Indians to become hegemonic. Most of the governmental functions began to be carried out in English too. Some eminent personalities of India also supported the introduction of English into the Indian system. For instance, Raja Ram Mohan Roy supported the introduction of English system of education so that an access could be gained into modern science and liberal education of Britain. But the tyranny of the British made Indians rebel in every respect. National language began to be seen as a symbol of unity and national pride and started to be considered as an important part of freedom struggle.

After independence, debate was mainly among three popular languages, viz. Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. “Most of the regional languages like Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, etc were found to be not suitable in spite of their literary accomplishments, owing to geographical restrictions.” These languages were not spread beyond a province/state.

It was proposed that Hindi should be made the official language of the country because it was the mother tongue of around forty percent of the people living in India and was understood by a large proportion of non-Hindi speaking population as well. This proposal ignited debates in non-Hindi states. Soon, it gave rise to agitations throughout the country. They argued why Hindi was being selected as the official language and why not any other languages like Tamil, etc, which had a considerable following as well. This was discussed in detail in the Constituent Assembly.

What is language discrimination?

Language discrimination occurs when a person is treated differently because of her native language or other characteristics of her language skills. For example, an employee may be experiencing language discrimination if the workplace has a “speak-English-only” policy but her primary language is one other than English. She may also be the victim of language discrimination if she is treated worse than other employees because she speaks English with an accent, or if she is told she does not qualify for a position because her English is not good enough. Language discrimination may also occur if a person is denied access to businesses or government services because he or she does not speak, understand, read or write English well.

Why is language discrimination illegal?

The laws mentioned above make it illegal for employers to discriminate against an employee because of his or her national origin. (“National origin” generally refers to the country that a person, or that person’s ancestors, came from.)  But because the primary language a person speaks is closely related to the place she came from, or the place her ancestors came from, being discriminated against for using that language, or because of characteristics having to do with that language, has much the same effect as if that person were being discriminated against because of her national origin..

What are examples of linguistic discrimination?

Language discrimination occurs when a person is treated differently because of her native language or other characteristics of her language skills. For example, an employee may be experiencing language discrimination if the workplace has a “speak-English-only” policy but her primary language is one other than English.

CONSTITUTION IN RELATION TO LANGUAGE

India is a multilingual country. So the fathers of our Constitution felt the need to specify the languages to be used in the state functions. Therefore, Part XVII of the Indian Constitution came into existence which not only provides for the official language of the Union(Article 343-344) and official languages of the states(Article 345) but also the language of interstate-communication (Article 346-347), language to be used in the courts and in legislative processes (Article 348). Apart from these provisions, there are some special directives too (Article 350-351). Actually, this chapter is based on Munshi-Ayyangar formula and accordingly the language policy has been provided in four parts: Language of the Union, Regional languages, Languages of the Courts and Special directives.