The Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, a government body formed in 2021, has claimed that the diverse languages of India are “one family”. This rejects the four-fold classification of languages made much earlier by linguists — Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman — as a “colonial perspective”. Pushing grammar into spirituality and the present government’s concept of culture are some of the ways to make Sanskrit all-pervading. Linguists thus point towards convergence because of geographical proximity but that cannot make all languages into ‘one family’. They are basing their argument on logic and learning, neither of which has anything to do with the Samiti’s claims.

Source: The Telegraph January 30, 2026 02:23 UTC