Need to save languages

Vijay Garg

(vkmalout@gmail.com)

When any language ceases to be the mother tongue, the necessity of
its use and the employment-oriented work provided by it also begin to decline. This is what has been happening with our language and dialects in the last seventy-five years. But now, taking a remarkable initiative under the new National Education Policy, the Central Government is going to take five new measures from the new session. In these, emphasis will be laid on teaching text books to children in their mother tongue, home tongue, and regional languages. Fifty-two text books have been prepared for this. In the country, there are 121 languages that the regional people use for writing and speaking at the local level. Soon, booklets will be made available in the regional languages of the remaining states of the country. This is a transformative initiative to save the existence of extinct mother tongues.

Regional languages and dialects are our cultural heritage. Any language may be spoken by a minimum number of people in a small area, but it contains an infinite treasure of traditional knowledge. When such languages are no longer used as mother tongues, they start becoming extinct. Especially tribal and other tribal languages are becoming extinct due to continuous neglect. Such situations are emerging in India that, with the death of a person, his language is also cremated. With the death of eighty-five-year-old Boa of the Andaman Islands on January 26, 2010, the Andamanese language 'Bo' also became extinct forever. She was the last person to know, speak, and write this language. Before this, the 'Khora' language came to an end with the death of another woman, Boro, in November 2009. The fact is that with the death of any language, the knowledge base of that language, its history, culture, and everything related to that region also gets destroyed.

The main reason for the extinction of languages and their speakers from these geographies has been to forcibly integrate them into the mainstream and provide them with modern education. Due to such circumstances, many primitive languages are on the verge of extinction. The Government of India has collected data on languages that are spoken by more than ten thousand people. According to 2011 census data, there are 121 such languages, and there are 4 mother tongues. Language: Those languages and dialects whose number of speakers is less than ten thousand were not included in the calculation. According to the 'National Geographic Society and Living Tags Institute for Endangered Languages', there has been one language death every fortnight. By the year 2100, more than seven thousand languages spoken across the globe may disappear. Of these, twenty-seven hundred languages are endangered all over the world. These languages include seventeen languages in Assam. According to information released by UNESCO, Assam's Deori, Mising, Kachari, Beite, Tiwa, and Koch Rajvanshi are the most endangered languages. The prevalence of these language dialects is continuously decreasing. The concerns of the new generation are limited to Assamese, Hindi, and English. Despite this, twenty-eight thousand Deori-speaking people, five and a half lakh Missing-speaking people, and about nineteen thousand Beite-speaking people are still left. Apart from these, the knowledge of Bodo, Karbo, Dimasa, Vishnupriya Manipuri, Manipuri, and Kakbarak languages in Assam is also continuously decreasing. Due to the decreasing prevalence of these languages in homes, markets, and employment, the new generation is adopting them. She is not learning. The same languages may survive in the form of scripts that remain in use. There are more than fifteen thousand languages recorded all over the world, but today, more than half of them are extinct. The reason for this is to deprive them of their use. Many people consider the attacks of invaders to be the reason for the extinction of languages. The same was believed in India too, but this is a false fact. This misconception is also spreading in France. French speakers are worried that the young generation there is attracted to English; hence, ways to get rid of English are being suggested. In fact, the language needs to remain useful. If languages remain the language of conversation as well as curriculum, employment, and technology, then they cannot become extinct. The Bika languages of Nigeria and Cameroon became extinct due to a lack of use.

When those who kept this language in use started dying one by one, the language also started disappearing with them; similarly, the death of languages is becoming a trend in every era and every country. Today, there is no one to decipher India's oldest Brahmi script. Similarly, many languages and dialects in Asia, Africa, and Australia are dying out. It is only through languages that we are able to mark the uniqueness of nature and the social diversity that has existed for ages in different forms. It is only through language that we are able to create a framework for development. The language that is associated with this development remains alive. Today, while English is proving to be the villain in the extinction of languages, its importance cannot be ignored because it is based on modern technology. It has become the worldwide basis for practical and commercial use. The young generation of the world is attracted to English to connect with world society. But if English continues to spread like this, there will be linguistic uniformity in the world, and many languages will die out. All the local languages and dialects of India are in danger due to the increasing influence of English. Having become the official language of business, administration, medicine, engineering, and technology, English has become the main basis of employment-oriented education.

For these reasons, the new generation is increasingly forced to free itself from the attachment of the mother tongue and adopt English. In the era of competition, inferiority complexes are also growing among the youth regarding their mother tongue. To save the languages, the need of the hour is that only those who know the local language of a particular area should be given employment in corporations, bodies, panchayats, banks, and other government offices. This will challenge the spreading dominance of English, and these people will not only preserve their languages and dialects but will also provide them dignity by making them the basis of employment. Only through policies will the young generation be free from the inferiority complex towards the mother tongue. From this perspective, education in fifty-two regional languages is a unique and necessary initiative. Such changes in language-related policies will make it possible to save endangered languages.