CLASSICAL LANGUAGE STATUS FOR MARATHI

Similar status accorded to Pali, Prakrit, Assamese & Bengali, taking the total number of languages in this category to 11

- Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

The Union Cabinet has conferred 'classical language' status on five more languages - Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali. The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday. The decision, particularly for Marathi, comes as the state is poised for assembly polls next month. Announcing the decision, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said these classical languages were a repository of India's ancient cultural heritage. This new category of languages was first created in 2004, when Tamil was declared a classical language.

Classical status is accorded to languages on the basis of high antiquity of its recorded history of at least a thousand years, presence of a body of literature and texts; and if the literary tradition of the language were original and not borrowed from another community's speech. The parameters were revised in 2005, to cover languages having a recorded history of 1,500-2,000 years. An additional requirement incorporated was that the classical language and its literature had to be distinct from its later forms or offshoots. After Tamil, the other languages that were conferred the classical status included Sanskrit in 2005, Telugu and Kannada in 2008, Malayalam in 2013 and Odia in 2014.