GONDI LANGUAGE

March 7, 2019

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath has decided to include ancient tribal language 'GONDI' in the primary education curriculum of the state's tribal-dominated districts.

Gonds tribe:

According to 2011 Census, Gonds, believed to belong to the Dravidian stock, have been notified as a scheduled tribe in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal and West Bengal.
The largest numbers are concentrated in the central part of India, known among tribal groups as Gondwana, which includes the Satpuda Plateau, a portion of the Nagpur plain area and the Narmada Valley.
Census 2011: The total population of the Gond tribe in the country is 11,344,629. This tribe comprises 13.45 per cent of the total Scheduled Tribes’ population of India, and is the largest tribal group in the country.

Gondi Language:

Language family: Gondi is a South-Central Dravidian language.
Census 2011: The total Gondi speaking population, according to it, is 2,713,790.
Script:
- The Gondi script is perhaps the only script in the country besides Urdu which is written right to left.
- In the northern and central India, it is the only language, barring Gujarati, which has a script of its own. All other north and central Indian languages use the Devnagri script.
Dialects:
- Gondi, is heavily influenced by the other local languages spoken in the respective states. E.g. the Gondi spoken in Andhra Pradesh is known colloquially as “Telugu Gondi” and that spoken in Maharashtra is known as “Marathi Gondi”.
- Some of the more important dialects are Dorla, Koya, Madiya, Muria, and Raj Gond.
Neglect by Government of India:
- The Gond tribal community feel that the language has been unduly ignored by the Indian government by not including it in the 8^th Schedule of the Constitution.
- Gondi has also not been included under the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, which is developing a unicode – a programme for computers, which allows the user to type in any of the 22 Scheduled Indian languages.