1 National Conference on Interdisciplinary Researches in Social Sciences in Eastern India with special reference to Jharkhand 27-28 February 2014, Indian Statistical Institute, Giridih, Jharkhand, India Language Attitude of Khortha Speakers in Giridih: A Survey Report Niladri Sekhar Dash Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata Email: ns_dash@yahoo.com 1. Introduction The Linguistic Research Unit (LRU) of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata conducted a pilot survey on language attitude from 21 st to 25 th March 2011 in the town of Giridih as well as in some villages in and around the town Giridih in the district of Jharkhand among the native Khortha speakers to understand the attitude of the speakers about their mother tongue – Khortha. The primary goals of this survey were (a) to delve into the sociolinguistic status of this minority language at different villages and localities in the district; (b) to document the attitude of the native speakers regarding the status and state of their mother tongue; (c) to identify their basic requirements related to generation of linguistic resources and materials in their mother tongue; and (d) to record their voices regarding the promotion of their mother tongue within the mainframe language planning activities of the state vis-à-vis of the country. The present paper seeks to portray a perceptible cameo of the findings from this survey as well as the observations of the members of the investigating team. The LRU, as a part of its social obligation, includes Khortha – a dialect spoken in and around Giridih – into its frame of research and development activities as a part of its mission for promotion, restoration, and preservation of endangered Indian languages. The LRU also aims at developing linguistic resources, systems and tools for the benefit of the minority dialect communities. Thus, LRU tries to establish its functional relevance in the service of the nation and its people under the aegis of an academic-cum-research institute which has already proved its commitment for the growth and development of the nation. It is well known that exhaustively documented and digitized language corpora of the endangered and minority languages are useful for works relating to language preservation, language planning, sociolinguistics, dialectology, areal linguistics, culture studies, sociology, geolinguistics, ecolinguistics, biolinguistics, and semiotics (Labov 1972, Abbi 2001, Austin 2006, Austin 2010b). Keeping these goals in mind LRU had planned for an attitude survey among the native Khortha speakers in and around the town Giridih to measure the dimension of linguistic scenario of the locality, the analysis of which might lead to formulate separate project proposals for exhaustive dialect data collection and analysis for retrieving various sociolinguistic, ecolinguistics and ethnolinguistic data and information from the Khortha speakers. The long-term goal is to record Free Discourse Text (FDT) for documentation and digitization of the dialect under investigation. The investigating team consisted of eight members including the Principal Investigator. The structure of the team was as follows: 1 Principal Investigator-cum-Supervisor, 2 Field Linguists, 4 Data Collectors, 1 Videographer, 1 Technical Assistant (computer), and 1 Mediator (local agent). The main task of the Mediator was to establish a communication link of the investigating team with the local people and target informants. His other tasks were to convince the head of the Khortha speech community about the goal of the survey; win trust of the local people as well as dispel doubts and distrust from the minds of the informants about the investigation. The Data Collectors were engaged in face-to-face interviews with the