Linguistic Survey of India

The Linguistic Survey of India, often referred to as the LSI, is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist who attended the Seventh International Oriental Congress held at Vienna in September 1886. He made a proposal of the linguistic survey and it was initially turned down by the Government of India. After persisting and demonstrating that it could be done at low cost using the existing network of government officials at a reasonable cost, it was approved in 1891. It was however formally begun only in 1894 and the survey continued for thirty years with the last of the results being published in 1928.

An on-line searchable database of the LSI is available, providing an excerpt for each word as it appeared in Grierson's original publication. In addition, the British Library has gramophone recordings in its sound archive which document the phonology.

Grierson made use of Government officers to collect data from across India. He made forms and guidance material for the officers who gathered the information. There were numerous problems in ensuring uniformity of data gathering and clarity of understanding. One officer noted the difficulty even of noting the name of the language from a household. Interviewees would name their language after their caste.

The maps and boundaries indicated by Grierson have often been used by political groups seeking reorganizations of state boundaries.

The list of volumes published by Grierson from 1898 to 1928 are:

A second Linguistic Survey of India project was initiated by the Language Division of Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner of India in 1984. This project is ongoing and at the end of year 2010 approximately 40% of the survey has been completed. This survey has a limited objective to trace the changes in the linguistic scenario after Grierson’s study. Several professional linguists have criticized the project for repeating Grierson's methodological mistakes – like choosing local language teachers or government officials as informants rather than laypersons for collecting the linguistic data.

The 1991 census of India found 1,576 "mother tongues" with separate grammatical structures and 1,796 languages classified as "other mother tongues". Calls for a more complete and exact Linguistic Survey of India soon followed. It was noted that Grierson's works had relied on untrained field workers and neglected the former province of Burma, Madras and the then princely States of Hyderabad and Mysore. The result was that South India was under-represented in the LSI.

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