This is the pilot post to the series, “When the tongue stops, the flok ends” blog series ( check every monday ) started with a aim to bring indigenous communities of India to the forefront of internet community, highlighting the richness of their culture and tradition.
Read the first article: Tribe of the youngest
To be fully able to enjoy and cherish the beauty of the series one must understand the importance of language. Basically, language is an important cultural marker. Both language and culture have often been referred to as synonymously. One’s culture is determined, to a large extent, by the language one speaks.
So, what exactly is the term language death? How could a language which we speak every day could die? Is it a living thing to die or become extinct just like that?
Let me explain, Language death is not just a word. It is a term used when the language is no longer known or when the last native speaker of it is lost, also when the second- language takes the place of the first one. Language death has been classified based on their process of going extinct as gradual, bottom to top, top to bottom, radical, linguicide, and language attrition.
Often when a language ceases the entire culture ceases to exist. Therefore, the death of a language can result in the death of a culture to which it belongs to.
But does anyone know exactly what happens when a language dies? A unique way of looking at the world disappears.
Looking at the reasons behind this is that most of the native language speakers are losing language proficiency in order to learn new languages to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination. Well other than this there are also economic, political, etc. reasons for a language death.
India, being a linguistically diverse country with innumerable languages spoken by a wide variety of communities, is facing the threat of language death. This phenomenon, which has been borrowed from the linguistic field of study, means the death of a language due to the decrease in the number of its speakers. Within the Indian nation many languages, especially those spoken by the ethnic minorities, are facing a threat of extinction due to the decrease in the population of these communities. It is not just the ethnic minorities facing this threat. Many remote villages, spread across the world, unaware to the rest of the world are suffering from this kind of cultural death.
Understanding this term more clearly we need to check out the statistical data of language death. According to a survey done in 2010 on Indian languages, which shockingly says that 600 of the total 1652 languages spoken in India are dying, among these 600, 250 of them have already died, and by 2050 there will be 750 of them. Adding to this, we can exemplify the Latin language which died due to fall of Roman Empire (political reason) and then was simplified into the Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. In the same fashion, Sanskrit in India becoming slowly extinct and may die sooner then we expect.
In an article that appeared in The Hindu, it was said that nearly 42 Indian languages are under the verge of extinction. The languages listed out, with speakers of it mostly from the remote areas of various Indian states, have been declared endangered by the UNESCO. This symbolically means that forty-two cultures or way of lives in India is going to be washed away soon. An entire community, entire mankind, an entire way of living is going to end in the near future. It is not just the language that we are losing but an entire era, an entire set of myths and believes associated with it. In the larger run, if the scenario continues, India will lose its identity of being a multicultural, multilingual nation, because, in the end, it will only be one or a few languages that will manage to thrive and therefore only a few cultures.
This threat of increasing death of languages can indeed be seen as a warning about the impending doom of an erasure of the larger mankind itself. This can be a wakeup call, a wakeup call to stand together against all odds, to be unified in diversity and stand together for the sustainability of one another.
