Nurturing Linguistic Diversity in Grassroots

Possibilities of Community Media in the International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Abstract

 This paper explores the ways in which community media in India engages with the languages of indigenous communities and reasserts the case for leveraging its potential to nurture those tongues in the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In doing so, it presents a case study of Radio Kotagiri, a community radio in the Nilgiris district in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu. The paper draws its data from a broader ethnographic study conducted in 2021. To situate the arguments, the paper also comes into a dialogue with scholarship on language attrition, community media, media anthropology and minority media studies. Through three thematic sub-sections in the discussion, the paper demonstrates the community media practices in relation to indigenous languages in the local context and the implications of such practices for its stakeholders.