Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh , Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages rendered the welcome during the valedictory session of Prof. M. B. Emeneau Centenary International Conference on South Asian Linguistics. He welcomed Mr. Sudip Banerjee, Additional Secretary, Department of Secondary and Higher Education, Government of India, representing the Ministry in the conference.

       Summarizing the happenings of the conference, Prof. Singh affirmed that the conference was a truly great experience, attributed to the scholarship of Emeneau. He observed that the deliberations had brought out the relevance of Emeneau's works, though 50 years old, even to this day succinctly.

       Prof. Singh stated that seven lessons were learnt during the conference. The first lesson, according to him was to be careful of any enterprise that looked dangerously neat, especially regarding the theories of modern linguistics. The second lesson was related to humanities and scienticism, where pseudo-scientism should be watched out for, otherwise universals might become blank fires. The third lesson was the prognosis prediction used by socio-linguists and linguists; and the need to re-look into subscription to scienticism. The fourth lesson is considering history as a teacher, he emphasized that our analytical tools were built on principles of categorization and classification, some depending on dichotomies. The fifth one was regarding the progress, a demand for uncovering the real structure of a given language to which Chomskyian revolution provided great leap to enter unknown territories of human world. Lesson six is related to consider language as a site of human struggle and argued that linguistics must move to create more rational space. The seventh and the last lesson was regarding the modernist positions that exhibit declared lack of confidence in language and tradition, from the past 50 years. Linguistics is used as a passive eye to arrest rapidly fading linguistic landscape. Prof. Singh asserted that this passivity should be used as an instrument of change-as a tool of social engineering.

         Prof. Singh emphasized that new models, new methods of identifying linguistic area were the need of the hour. He also gave a brief introduction to the achievements done at CIIL in the field of language studies, publications, cassette and radio courses, e-books and new endeavors like LIS India, Bhasha Bharathi, Tenth Plan Projects and Online Projects.

        Speaking about the Road Map for the future, Prof. Singh explaining the series of steps undertaken to promote inter-lingual harmony, clinical linguistics and corpus linguistics and collaborations with other agencies, said that it was time to ward of the dragon called globalization.

       He concluded that the conference has given courage and direction to pursue the studies in the field of linguistics.