Language Friendship Bridge Project: India to bridge language gap with neighbours

Source: The post is based on the article “India to bridge language gap with neighbours” published in The Hindu on 10th April 2023

What is the News?

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations(ICCR) has planned a special project called ‘The Language Friendship Bridge’.

What is the Language Friendship Bridge Project?

Aim: To create a pool of experts in languages spoken in countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan and Indonesia to facilitate better people-to-people exchanges.

Under the project, ICCR has planned to train five to 10 people in the official languages of each of these countries.

– As of now, the ICCR has zeroed in on 10 languages: Kazakh, Uzbek, Bhutanese, Ghoti (spoken in Tibet), Burmese, Khmer (spoken in Cambodia), Thai, Sinhalese and Bahasa (spoken in both Indonesia and Malaysia).

What is the need for this project?

In India, the language learning focus till now has been on European languages like Spanish, French and German, along with the languages of major Asian economies like China and Japan.

However, the focus on other languages like kazak, Sinhalese, Bhutanese have been very less. Only a handful of universities teach these languages, Sinhala, for example, is taught at the Banaras Hindu University and the School of Foreign Languages (SFL) under the Ministry of Defence. 

Hence, considering our cultural imprints in these countries, India cannot afford to ignore the languages of these countries.

How will the project be implemented?

ICCR has discussed two possibilities for implementing this project:

One is to institute tie-ups wherein teachers from these countries come and teach courses in India.

The second approach is ICCR offering scholarships to Indian students to go and study these languages in the countries where they are spoken.

Language experts feel that the second option is the better one as a proper cultural environment is needed to learn a language in its entirety.