Language, Education and Society: Multilingualism in India

India is said to be a sociolinguistic giant, and this giant is huge and different from the ordinary. The nerve system of this giant is multilingualism. Indian multilingualism is enormous in size, with over 1600 mother tongues reducible to about 200 languages for a population of about 1.27 billion people, with the population of many of the linguistic minorities being larger than many European countries (Annamalai, 2001). According to Li Wei (Wei, 2000), “Language is a human faculty: it coevolves with us” and monolingualism, which even in normal circumstances is a rare phenomenon, is beyond imagination in a context such as India where English has coexisted with indigenous languages over a long period. In fact, the magnitude of multilingualism in India has made scholars wonder about how communication happens and how social cohesion is maintained (Annamalai, 2001)