Mysore/Mysuru: A day-long Bharatiya Bhasha Utsav-2022 was held at CIIL (Central Institute of Indian Languages) on Hunsur Road here yesterday.

The event was held as part of the Central Government’s Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat initiative and aimed at providing students with information about Indian languages, strengthening language harmony among the population and develop a conducive environment for learning more and more Indian languages.

Delivering the keynote address, Tamil scholar and former English faculty of Presidency College, Chennai, Prof. V. Murugan, defined the main features of the Tamil language.

Explaining why Tamil as a major Dravidian tongue, is one of the primary classical languages of the world, he said that this may also offer one or two reasons as to what it means to be a scientific understanding of  the language.

Pointing out that he also intends to throw light on how the Tamil language goes beyond being a vehicle of human expression and addresses issues of social cohesion, harmony with nature and universality of outlook, Prof. Murugan contended that the origin of Tamil goes back to a time that is, arguably, much earlier than the beginning of the common era.

Tamil, all through the course of its existence has been an inseparable blend of the spoken and the written forms, he added.

Prof. Murugan also gave a brief on the structure, totality, structural homogeneity, sociology and ecopoetics of Tamil language.

CIIL Director Prof. Shailendra Mohan, who too spoke, stressed on the need for understanding and analysing the commonness of Indian languages. He said that languages have a common linguistic structure that needs to be discovered  and documented.

Pointing out that knowledge could be gained from the manuscripts of various languages, Prof. Shailendra said that there is a need to understand whether these texts need to be scientifically appraised for reaping larger benefits and added that there were languages that are spoken by a few which need to be developed besides stating that these few languages would be developed by the CIIL as part of its language development programmes.

The CIIL Director said that the Institute was working on a mobile phone app on languages which will be launched with 25 languages initially and further it will be expanded to 75 languages. He also said that 217 languages which are less spoken will be incorporated in the app later.

Earlier, Prof. C.V. Sivaramakrishna, Deputy Director of CIIL, delivered the welcome address.

Dr. Sujoy Sarkar, L-JRO, CIIL and others were present.

The day-long event featured lecture sessions, followed by cultural programmes.