India is a country which boasts of rich cultural heritage including a large number of languages. In addition to the ancient Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit,India has 21 modern languages along with 19,500 dialects out of which 121 are spoken by more than 10,000 persons per language.
Right from the days when Christian missionaries of various denominations from western countries landed in India, they gave body and soul to learning of the local languages and conducting prayer meetings in them. Credit goes to German missionaries for having compiled the first-ever dictionaries in many Indian languages; for instance, Malayalam, the language of Kerala, Southern India owes its first dictionary to Hermann Gundert( 1814-1893), a German Missionary. As for the Protestant missionaries who worked in Northern India during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, they incorporated in liturgy, a good number of Urdu words which had been introduced by the Mughal dynasty. Many such words are still in use !
Since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church (comprising all rites) in India ,led by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India(CBCI), has been committed to the use of local languages in conducting liturgy and in evangelizing. But sometimes a situation arises when a considerably good number of people whose mother-tongue may be different from the local language of the place they are staying in , build a church of their own and conduct services in their mother-tongue . For instance, a few hundreds of Roman Catholics from Goa whose mother-tongue is Kongani, may build a church of their own in Northern India where the spoken language is Hindi,and celebrate Mass in Kongani which may hardly be understood by the people staying around or passing by. Such a church would contribute little to evangelizing the people who remain mute spectators to the prayers.
My question therefore is:Has the Catholic Church issued any guidelines in relation to the language(s) to be used by churches in places like India where there is multiplicity of spoken languages ?