Current Research Bulletin

India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity forms a vital part of its cultural, intellectual, and civilisational heritage. Indigenous and minority languages are repositories of collective memory, oral traditions, ecological knowledge, cultural values, and community identity. However, unequal educational, economic, administrative, and technological structures often enable dominant languages to displace indigenous languages from important domains, weakening intergenerational transmission of language and culture.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides an important framework for addressing these challenges through its emphasis on multilingualism, mother-tongue or home-language education, Indian languages, bilingual learning materials, local cultural contexts, and Indian Knowledge Systems. It recommends the use of the home, mother, local, or regional language as the medium of instruction, wherever possible, at least until Grade 5 and preferably beyond Grade 8 (Ministry of Education, 2020). The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 further stresses local language, culture, heritage, indigenous knowledge, and traditional learning practices (National Steering Committee for National Curriculum Frameworks, 2023). UNESCO’s Bhasha Matters: State of the Education Report for India 2025 likewise highlights mother-tongue-based multilingual education as essential to inclusion and linguistic diversity (UNESCO, 2025).

Focusing particularly on Assam and North-East India, this paper critically examines NEP 2020 through Language Ecology, Linguistic Human Rights, Additive Multilingualism, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Cultural Sustainability. It proposes the DECDI framework—Documentation, Educational Inclusion, Community Participation, Digital Revitalisation, and Intergenerational Transmission—to translate policy vision into sustainable practice. The paper argues that preservation requires not merely symbolic recognition but meaningful contemporary domains for indigenous languages in education, research, digital spaces, and everyday life.

indigenous languages, multilingual education, NEP 2020, language revitalisation, cultural sustainability, language ecology, North-East India.

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