Mumbai: The dictionary ‘Hindi Shabd Sindhu’ has incorporated words from Odia and other regional languages to fill gaps where Hindi lacked words, Union home minister Amit Shah has said.
More than 50,000 words from Indian regional languages had been incorporated into the dictionary from Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali, among others, thereby making Hindi more flexible, he said.
The ‘Hindi Shabd Sindhu’, which began with 51,000 words, had now grown to eight lakh words, Shah said, expressing confidence that it would become the world’s largest dictionary by 2029.
Cultural nationalism meant creating awareness about India’s culture and history, the minister said, asserting that the country’s diverse languages could have different voices but the national sentiment should remain one, PTI reported.
All political differences must be set aside to promote Indian languages, he said, pointing to how a child can understand the country only through his or her mother tongue.
Shah said Bal Gangadhar Tilak had understood that awareness about the country’s culture and history could be created through cultural nationalism, while addressing the 6th All India Rajbhasha Sammelan in Mumbai.
He also linked the promotion of Indian languages to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pledge to free the country from a “mindset of slavery”.
It was Tilak who started public Ganesh Chaturthi festivities and celebrations of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s birth anniversary. Both festivals eventually spread beyond Maharashtra, helping create a wave of patriotism during the freedom struggle, Shah said.
Maharashtra had the country’s most multilingual culture, with Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Sindhi, Hindi, Kannada and Warli among the languages spoken and developed there, the minister pointed out.
Hindi should act as a means of communication and connection among India’s languages rather than as a means of competition, he said, pointing to how Vinoba Bhave had said that Hindi enabled him to take the message of the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement nationwide.
His knowledge of Hindi had helped him work across the country when his party assigned him a national-level responsibility, the home minister said.
The Centre wants to make Indian languages the language of governance and science, he said, adding that the aim is to enrich them through literature.
“One of the biggest steps that PM Modi has taken is that, under NEP, he has made learning in mother tongue compulsory and also made learning another Indian language mandatory. Those opposing NEP provision of learning one more Indian language apart from mother tongue do not yet know what mistake they are making,” he said.
More than five lakh central government employees had undergone language training, while AI-based ‘Kanthasth 2.0’ had been made available to foreigners with more than five crore sentences, the minister said. ‘Leela Rajbhasha’ and ‘Leela Pravah’ had also been developed as language-learning resources, he added.
