Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: The Cabinet in a decision on Thursday declared Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali as classical languages.
This is in addition to six languages that have already been notified — Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia.
To be declared a classical language, a Linguistic Experts Committee has to have a extended period of recorded history of their texts, not less than 1500-2000 years as well as a body of ancient literature and texts, which is considered a heritage by generations of speakers. It also need to have knowledge texts — prose texts in addition to poetry, epigraphical and inscriptional evidence — and in its classical form, must be distinct from its current form or discontinuous with its later forms of its offshoots.
Declaration of classical languages began in 2004, when the government declared Tamil a classical language, and formed the Experts Committee.
The government, in a release, said that in 2013, the Maharashtra Government sent a proposal to the union ministry of culture requesting Classical Language status to Marathi, which was forwarded to the Committee.
“The Committee recommended Marathi for Classical Language. During the inter-ministerial consultations on the draft note for cabinet in 2017 for conferring classical status to the Marathi language, MHA advised to revise the criteria and make it stricter. PMO vide its comment stated that the Ministry may conduct an exercise to find out how many other languages are likely to become eligible,” the ministry said in the release.
Since then, proposals have also come from Bihar, Assam, and West Bengal to confer the status of Classical Language to Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali. “Accordingly, Linguistics Experts Committee (under Sahitya Akademi) in a meeting on 25.07.2024, unanimously revised the criteria as below. Sahitya Akademi has been appointed as nodal agency for the LEC,” the release read.