Bengal will now have as many as six “second official” languages, she announced on Thursday.
English and Bengali are the two official (presumably, first official) languages of the state. To these will be added Urdu, Gurmukhi, Nepali, Ol-Chiki, Oriya and Hindi.
Bureaucrats say the latest decree would make government offices a virtual tower of Babel. “The announcements would lead to more confusion as bureaucrats may be forced to learn Nepali, Gurmukhi, or Ol- chiki,” said one.
But learning some of these ‘languages’ might pose some problems. Gurmukhi is actually a script, not a language, a devnagari derivative used to write Punjabi.
The people of Nepali descent in West Bengal’s hill districts speak Gorkhali, not Nepali.
And Ol-Chiki, the language of the Santhal tribes, has a script which was only invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghuram Murmu, and is not taught in any school! Even Urdu, which superficially might be assumed to be spoken by the state’s large Muslim population, is spoken by less than 5 per cent of the state’s 2.3 crore Muslims.
In fact, all the languages singled out by Mamata are actually spoken by a minority.
Of the state’s 9 crore population, Santhals ( Ol- Chiki) accounted for 22.8 lakh, Nepali for 8 lakh, Punjabi 4 lakh and Oriya just around 1 lakh.
On the ground, observers say, this announcement will change little in the way the government machinery functions.
See: India Today
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