Endangered Languages

Endangered Languages

Nidhu Bhusan Das

International Mother Tongue Day has been observed across the globe with enthusiasm .It’s a nice idea since it encourages and inspires thought about the need for the preservation of languages which are not in the mainstream and belong to close communities. They, perhaps, do not have the inner strength to stand exposure to the wider linguistic world or the invasion of mainstream languages. Some of them are even beyond the fringe. But how far this will be able to save the endangered languages is a moot point in the age of globalization and cultural imperialism.

In India alone, according to UNESCO, 196 languages are endangered. In the whole world the number is staggering. If we consider the state of the speech communities whose languages are endangered we find that they are closed in nature. They do not often interact with the outer world, and if and when they or some members of them come in contact with the mainstream they do not use their mother tongue but interact, though feebly, using the mainstream language.Besides,their languages are not being enriched with creative use in the form of literary activities and developing capacity to embody the ideas and expressions of the world of science & technology and social sciences. Given the reality, how to save the languages from extinction is an important issue to be concerned with.

A language faces extinction or gets stagnated for different reasons which broadly fall into two categories- political and economic.

The advent of the Aryans and their dominance established the sway of the Vedic language which subsequently came to be known as Sanskrit having been reformed by the great grammarian Panini.The waves of Germanic tribes into England cornered the Celtic speech community, the aborigines of the country, and Anglo-Saxon became the language of the realm. Anglo-Saxon is the ancestor of English. The settlement of English Puritans in the American continent pushed the Red Indians to the fringes and English became the dominant language in North America. Australia, the penal colony of Britain, became a new English speaking territory. All this could happen because of the political dominance of the invading speech community.

With political dominance goes the economic mite and influence. The speech community with political dominance keeps others in subjugation and the subjects become bound to accept the language of the masters to retain or gain economic privilege.True, all of the subjugated speech community does not accept the language of the masters en masse. Those who are ambitious and stand to lose their existing privilege take the first step towards acquiring the second language. Ultimately most of them follow the suit. Thus in England under the Norman domination French was learnt by a section of the English speech community to remain in or climb to aristocracy as in India a new class of English using natives and anglophiles appeared during the British colonial rule.

In the present age of globalization and cultural imperialism, it is really difficult to preserve the languages incapable of adapting themselves to the developments in the fields of science & technology and social sciences. English is the global language and every branch of knowledge is encapsulated in English for it’s global reach.Besides, the cultural contents of the west are dished out in English through TV and Internet to the rest of the world in attractive ways for the other speech communities to adapt to and adopt to the perils of their mother tongues and folkways.

Vis-à-vis such invasion, only those languages can survive which have the resilience and capacity to absorb the shock and assimilate the contents of the knowledge and message and thereby enrich themselves. Yet they will remain in the fringe because the new generations of the other speech communities will choose English as the medium of instruction for jobs in the global market.