Languages and Scripts.

• Author: Shapiro, Michael C.

This book is not what it would appear to be from its title, namely a survey of the languages and scripts of India, categorized according to some appropriate set of linguistic criteria. Rather, the book contains something unusual and unanticipated, namely an inventory of the languages spoken and scripts used in an enumerated set of 4635 "communities" in the Republic of India, accessed primarily by community instead of by language, The research leading to this book was part of the People of India (POI) project, a massive undertaking by the Anthropological Survey of India, begun in 1985, to generate a descriptive sketch of all of the communities of India. In essence, this book takes individual communities and describes the languages employed in these communities for ingroup and intergroup purposes, and as well enumerates the State or States inhabited by the communities. The explicit premise underlying this work is that the compilation of language data viewed from the perspective of communities provides a necessary counterweight to the linguistic data contained in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) and the Census of India, both of which are structured in terms of such decidedly linguistic criteria as language family, subfamily, dialect, and the like.

The structure of the book at hand is somewhat strange, consisting of introductory material, ten appendices, and a brief bibliography. The introductory material contains a terse (and not very satisfactory) survey of the history of Indian languages, language study, and language census taking. It also contains a short overview of the history of Indian scripts. The bulk of the introductory material is given over to distillations of statistical data generated by the People of India project. These summations provide data for such matters as the number of languages distributed over the various communities, the number of communities using the scheduled languages with their variants, the number of communities speaking languages of different language families, the number of bi- and multilingual communities, and the degree of linguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity in India. It is in these summations that we learn, for example, that of the over 4500 communities studied, more than 60% speak languages belonging to the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, or that "of 730 communities studied across States and Union Territories, 380 communities are linguistically heterogeneous and 350 communities...