information about save Kannada movement
Answers
Answer:
If you are a Kannadiga in a gathering of fellow natives, sooner or later the one topic that almost inevitably comes up is the apparent "death of Kannada".
The gist of these conversations is how the language and culture as a whole is slowly fading away.
Most people put the blame for this downward spiral on Bangalore, the great cosmopolitan capital of Karnataka.
The lament usually is - "People from all over India are coming to our city but they don't know Kannada and therefore Kannada is being made a 'secondary' language in our own state!"
As a Kannadiga, I have always found this convenient bypassing of blame to the 'outsiders' an extremely demeaning stand to take. Is my culture really so weak that it is dependent on ‘outsiders’ being forced to ‘learn’ it to survive?
How shameful.
When we, the natives of this land, are unwilling to build our own culture, what right do we have to demand that a Bengali or a Punjabi suddenly get new respect for a language and a culture that is essentially alien to them?
It only requires a revival which can be brought about by ourselves, in our homes.
1) Literature
Karnataka has a literacy rate of some 75%.
This is a slightly misleading figure because it just means the ability to read and write in any language.
Even if we assume that only 70% of our population speaks Kannada as its mother tongue and only 70% of them can read and write and only 50% of those people actually read regularly, we are left with a figure of roughly 1.5 crore Kannadigas. (Out of a total of 6.11 crore, 2011 census)
But how many of these actually go out and read something?
I have no statistics on hand for this, but whenever I talk to book publishers, I am told that if a few thousand copies of a Kannada book are sold, that can be considered a good sale.
Karnataka has a literacy rate of some 75%.
This is a slightly misleading figure because it just means the ability to read and write in any language.
Even if we assume that only 70% of our population speaks Kannada as its mother tongue and only 70% of them can read and write and only 50% of those people actually read regularly, we are left with a figure of roughly 1.5 crore Kannadigas. (Out of a total of 6.11 crore, 2011 census)
But how many of these actually go out and read something?
I have no statistics on hand for this, but whenever I talk to book publishers, I am told that if a few thousand copies of a Kannada book are sold, that can be considered a good sale.