Bhubaneswar, March 30: The state government would set up a museum to facilitate more research in Odia and smaller language groups, including those used by the ethnic communities.

The proposed museum would function from the culture university's new campus at Madanpur.

School and mass education minister Debi Prasad Mishra today said the museum could be housed in the same building on the culture university campus that would host the proposed Central Institute of Classical Odia - for which the Centre has given the go ahead. The green signal for the institute came in the wake of grant of classical status to Odia language.

While speaking at the second National Language Conference-2015, Mishra said: "After attaining the classical status, languages such as Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit and Malayalam are having central institutes to do more research. Once the institute for Odia is set up here, we can start the museum to undertake more research."

Odisha has started a programme to facilitate education of 21 ethnic groups of the state in their own languages. "The entire Northeast houses 24 language groups, while Odisha alone houses 62 ethnic groups. Once the language museum and a language laboratory come up here, imparting education through mother tongues for all would become easy," the minister said.

Linguist and director of the Centre for Oral and Tribal Languages of the Sahitya Akademi Anvita Abbi said: "Odia is a rich language and has a written and oral tradition of more than 1,500 years. Once the language museum comes to shape, it can contribute towards the development of the language."

Abbi was a former professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Saying that no language is small or big than its counter parts, the linguist also urged the state government to start scripting of the ethnic languages, so that they could have a good oral and written tradition that could be preserved.

Culture minister Ashok Chandra Panda said the state government was going to develop a gallery for palm-leaf manuscripts after launching the e-pothi (digitised palm-leaf manuscripts) on the department's website.

Founding director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, Debiprasanna Pattanayak said: "The Centre will provide funds for the Central Institute of Classical Odia, but it should finally function from an independent campus."