I cannot overstate the importance of this activity.
The Eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution is powerful. It is important. (See below why)
Coorgi, Pahadi, Chattisgarhi, Bhojpuri, all of these are living languages. Each has more speakers than Sanskrit. By an order of magnitude. Are they taught in schools, even state board schools? No. That changes once they make it to the Eighth Schedule.
Do not confused languages with scripts. A language without a script is NOT a dialect. Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Nepali all share the Devanagari script. Yet they feature independently in the Eighth. A shared script, vocabulary or grammar does not make your language any less than another.
A scheduled language has state protection. The Sahitya Kala Academy awards literature in that language. CDAC and NIC work on adding glyphs of that language into Unicode. AIR records media in that language for posterity.
(A decade ago, the railway board invited me to present a proposal on printing Indian languages on railways tickets. The impetus was the noise that our Tamil friends are always making about Hindi being on tickets but Tamil missing. But the board couldn't just implement Tamil. If they went beyond English and Hindi, they'd have to include everything in the eighth. Meiti has recently had its script added to Unicode, so we would have to support that too. Cool, isn't it? Get your language in the Eighth.)
(Unicode code pages are a shared global public copyright-free resource. Once the glyphs of your script are in Unicode, eventually they end up in all major operating systems. Applications like Facebook automatically support current and future Unicode codepages. I've been typing Indic scripts on computers since 1991 - trust me there is tremendous value in having your language/script digitised.)
The Eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution is powerful. It is important. (See below why)
Coorgi, Pahadi, Chattisgarhi, Bhojpuri, all of these are living languages. Each has more speakers than Sanskrit. By an order of magnitude. Are they taught in schools, even state board schools? No. That changes once they make it to the Eighth Schedule.
Do not confused languages with scripts. A language without a script is NOT a dialect. Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Nepali all share the Devanagari script. Yet they feature independently in the Eighth. A shared script, vocabulary or grammar does not make your language any less than another.
A scheduled language has state protection. The Sahitya Kala Academy awards literature in that language. CDAC and NIC work on adding glyphs of that language into Unicode. AIR records media in that language for posterity.
(A decade ago, the railway board invited me to present a proposal on printing Indian languages on railways tickets. The impetus was the noise that our Tamil friends are always making about Hindi being on tickets but Tamil missing. But the board couldn't just implement Tamil. If they went beyond English and Hindi, they'd have to include everything in the eighth. Meiti has recently had its script added to Unicode, so we would have to support that too. Cool, isn't it? Get your language in the Eighth.)
(Unicode code pages are a shared global public copyright-free resource. Once the glyphs of your script are in Unicode, eventually they end up in all major operating systems. Applications like Facebook automatically support current and future Unicode codepages. I've been typing Indic scripts on computers since 1991 - trust me there is tremendous value in having your language/script digitised.)