The TDIL Program and the Indian Langauge Corpora Intitiative (ILCI)

India is considered a linguistic ocean with 4 language families and 22 scheduled national languages, and 100 un-scheduled languages reported by the 2001 census. This puts tremendous pressures on the Indian government to not only have comprehensive language policies, but also to create resources for their maintenance and development. In the age of information technology, there is a greater need to have a fine balance between allocation of resources to each language keeping in view the political compulsions, electoral potential of a linguistic community and other issues. In this connection, the government of India through various ministries and a think tank consisting of eminent linguistics and policy makers has done a commendable job despite the obvious roadblocks. This paper describes the Indian government’s policies towards language development and maintenance in the age of technology through the Ministry of HRD through its various agencies and the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) through its dedicated program called TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages). The paper also describes some of the recent activities of the TDIL in general and in particular, an innovative corpora project called ILCI Indian Languages Corpora Initiative. 1. The linguistic scene in India India has a very complex and peculiar linguistic situation. There are 4 language families (Baldridge 96) – Indo Aryan (76.87 % speakers), Dravidian (20.82 % speakers), Austro-Asiatic (1.11 %), and Tibeto-Burman (1%) . These have 22 constitutionally recognized (scheduled) languages out of which Hindi has the ‘official’ status in addition to having the ‘national’ status. English which is not a national language of India has the status of ‘associate official’ language. Besides these, India has 100 mother tongues reported by the recent census (2001), and many more (running up to 1000) documented languages and dialects. A new language family called ‘Andamanese’ has been recently discovered (Abbi 2001), and the possibility of another – the 6th family called ‘Great Andamanese’– is very likely. Of the major Indian languages, Hindi is spoken in 10 states of India with a total population of over 45 % followed by Telugu and Bangla. Not only the languages, there are multitude of scripts as well. India has more than 18 scripts in India which need to be standardized and supported by technology. 2. Constitutional provisions and the language policy of India Indian has currently 25 states and 7 union territories (UTs). The Indian constitution adopted in 1950 lists 14 languages as scheduled languages of the union. In the schedule called THE EIGHTH SCHEDULE: (Articles 344 (1) and 351), the following languages are listed – • Assamese • Bengali • Gujarati • Hindi • Kannada • Kashmiri • Konkani • Malayalam • Manipuri • Marathi • Nepali • Oriya • Punjabi • Sanskrit • Sindhi • Tamil • Telugu • Urdu • Maithili • Bodo • Santhali • Dogri The Indian states and UTs have exclusive rights on their regional languages. However if the language of the state is also listed as scheduled language (as above), then the union has a constitutional obligation to promote the language. Hindi, besides being a scheduled (national) language with 21 other languages, is also the official language of the union with English as its associate. Hindi is the official language of 10 out of 25 Indian states and spoken by more than 42% of Indian population. Each of the 25 states and 7 UTs in India can have its official language (one from the 22 listed above) and several other minor languages the speakers of which have a fundamental right to maintain and promote these languages. The