UNESCO's 2003 report on language endangerment and vitality, in its preamble, quotes Russell Bernard: “About 97% of the world’s people speak about 4% of the world’s languages; and conversely, about 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by about 3% of the world’s people.” The report then infers, “Most of the world’s language heterogeneity, then, is under the stewardship of a very small number of people.”
India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. According to linguists' estimates, India is home to more than 700 languages out of the world’s total of nearly 7,000. The majority of these languages are minor and endangered languages, spoken by fewer than 10,000 speakers, and are therefore ignored by the Census of India.
According to UNESCO’s 1996 Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, any language that is not learnt as a “mother tongue” by at least 30 per cent of a community’s children needs to be considered seriously endangered.
As a linguist working with endangered language communities to document or revitalise their languages, I often face common resistance from the language community members themselves as well as neighbouring communities, who often ask: “Why preserve these languages? What is the benefit of speaking such languages? It does not get us jobs, nor does it allow us to travel to other places for education or employment. It even brings social stigma to us when identified as a member of a marginalized or oppressed community.”
Studies show that it is not linguistic diversity that kills off languages; rather, it is the rapid and mindless urbanisation in the name of development. Many language communities in India undergo forceful or coercive language loss because of the pressure for assimilation and social mobility. The more technologically and infrastructurally connected we are, the more we fall into homogenised boxes as citizens, workers, and even as netizens. This includes externally imposed codes of corporate culture—of which the coloniser’s language is an inescapable requisite—and internalised beliefs and stigma regarding one’s own culture and social status. Speaking one’s own mother tongue is unfashionable for dominant language speakers, but it is socially detrimental for minority/endangered language speakers. It does not help that minority language speakers also tend to belong to socially and economically minoritised, marginalised, and oppressed communities. Language becomes worthless collateral damage, the loss of which is a mere "side effect" in the process of development. It is left unseen because we prioritise the apparent benefits of development. So, what exactly is lost if your language is lost?
Imagine waking up tomorrow and forgetting your mother tongue. An educated Indian today typically speaks at least three languages, so being multilingual, one might imagine that they would be able to manage their daily life even without their mother tongue. But how realistic is this assumption?
We have heard the famous Akbar-Birbal story in which a polyglot, fluent in many languages, comes to Akbar’s court and challenges the scholars there to find out his mother tongue. When all others fail, Birbal hides near the polyglot's bedchamber and shocks him out of his deep sleep. The polyglot jumps awake, crying out in his mother tongue, and Birbal wins the challenge. As in this story, there are many instances in our daily life where nothing can replace our mother tongue. Many people cannot properly express their emotions in languages that are not their mother tongue. Many others use idioms and expressions from their mother tongues and try to use literal translations of them even when speaking English or other languages. Many swear in their mother tongues. Malayalis and Bengalis are particularly known for speaking their mother tongues when they encounter someone from the same state, often completely disregarding and excluding other people who may be present. Here, the mother tongue represents a social bond of belonging, shared cultural understanding, and value systems.
Our native language shapes our identity and serves as a medium to understand the world around us. This is why early education should start in a child’s mother tongue. Experts in the field of Mother-Language Education have shown how school dropout rates, especially in Adivasi communities, are caused by primary school textbooks and teaching being inaccessible to the students because the state language, the medium of education, is alien to them. To a child who lives with nature as their home and animals and plants as their friends and family, how can stories and examples of cars and city life be relatable?
Studies have also shown that the loss of the mother tongue can affect the well-being of the community in many ways. The decline in the intergenerational transmission of the mother tongue can be correlated with an increase in suicide rates and substance addiction among such communities, as well as to increasing school dropout rates. This is related to the identity struggle caused by the loss of cultural continuity. Language links people to their cultural past and anchors their social, emotional, ecological, and spiritual vitality. It helps one situate oneself in space and time in relation to everything and everyone else around them. Without this anchoring, youth across the world have been observed to fall into patterns of depression and self-effacement, leading to self-harm.
Each language encodes a unique way of seeing the world and making sense of where and how one is placed in the ecological and social fabric. For instance, the languages of northeast India show us how their beliefs about the peaceful coexistence of humans, animals, plants, and spirits underlie every aspect of their lives. Languages also encode sustainable ecological preservation practices that we can learn from. For example, many coastal languages have words that encode the depths of the sea at various distances and correlate them to other ecological phenomena related to those areas, while many Himalayan languages have words for the maximum height till which terraced paddy farming is possible, based on the terrain and rainfall patterns. Endangered species of flora and fauna have been discovered with the help of the knowledge encoded in the languages spoken in the forested areas.
Our native languages also influence the kinds of pattern recognition and contextual meaning-making we are capable of within our brain. Multilingualism fosters memory capacity, cognitive adaptability, task-switching skills, empathy, and mental flexibility. We stand to lose on all of these fronts if we lose our languages.
Fascinating facts:
The Sora language, spoken in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, uses a mixed number system of base-12 and base-20 unlike the common decimal system familiar to most of us. (Reference: Gregory Anderson, documentary, “The Linguists”)
In the Great Andamanese language, body part names encode the “zones” of the body they are located in. For instance, the word for “blood” will encode a prefix denoting whether it was from the head, torso, legs, etc. (Reference: Anvita Abbi, Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese)
In the Himalayan language Rodung, instead of an adverb of intensification like “very,” reduplication is employed in interesting ways. Eg. “chhakchhakwa” is ‘cold,’ “chhakchhakchhakwa” is ‘very cold,’ and “chhakchhakchhakchhakwa” is ‘very very cold.’ (Reference: Ktien Hima et al, SIDHELA archives of Sikkim University)
Onomatopoeia is the encoding of words denoting and imitating sounds from nature. The dog’s barking in English is “bow-wow,” in Hindi it is “bhow-bhow,” and in Tamil it is “Llol-llol.”
