Cabinet approved Odia as Classical Language

Union Cabinet on 20 February 2014 gave its nod for classifying Odia, the official language of Odisha as a classical language to give impetus to scholarships in the language. Odia is the first language from the Indo-Aryan linguistic group to be billed in the list of classical language. The proposal to give Odia a status of classical language was moved by the Culture Ministry.

Odia being one of the oldest languages has been declared as classical language because of the demands and also because it has no resemblance to Hindi, Bengali, Telugu and Sanskrit. Odia is the sixth language to become the classical language of the country.Other languages that have been declared as the classical languages are Tamil in 2004, Sanskrit in 2005, Telugu in 2008, Kannada in 2008 and Malayalam in 2013 of which four are Dravidian languages.