The Ministry of Home Affairs has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) in November 2022 with field videography of the country’s how many languages?

Question

Question

This question was previously asked in

69th BPSC Prelims Exam Official Paper (Held On: 30 Sept, 2023)

Answer 1

The correct answer is 576.

Key Points

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) with field videography of the country’s 576 languages.
The Mother Tongue Survey of India is a project that surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades.
It also documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
The category “mother tongue” is a designation provided by the respondent, but it need not be identical with the actual linguistic medium.
The NIC and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) will be documenting and preserving the linguistic data of the surveyed mother tongues in audio-video files.

Additional Information

As per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
They are grouped into 121 mother tongues.
According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 52.8 crore people or 43.6 per cent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue.
The next highest is Bengali, mother tongue for 9.7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 per cent of the population.
The new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) has recommended that mother tongue should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight years of age.
The new NCF, which deals with pre-school and classes I-II, emphasises the virtues of the mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction.