The Supreme Court has been discussing linguistics this month, while hearing challenges to the CBSE’s three-language formula, which mandates that two of the three must be native Indian languages, a category that does not include English. The Bench has been debating whether English should be considered a foreign language in India, given its long history in the country, and its role as a link language in governance and in higher education.
We discuss the same question in this week’s Parley, with Apoorvanand, a professor in the Hindi department of the University of Delhi, and Ganesh Devy, a former professor of English and the man behind the People’s Linguistic Survey of India project.
Host: Priscilla Jebaraj
Producer: Jude Weston
Read excerpts from the conversation
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Published – August 27, 2026 08:16 pm IST
