Celebrating our Independence Day should not only be about celebrating our achievements, of which we are justly proud; it should also be about deliberating on the problems of the common people, especially the marginalized. This piece is written from this perspective, focusing on languages under the threat of extinction.
In many parts of the world, there are languages at various stages of extinction, known as “endangered languages.” Since the 1990s, thanks to the influential work of MIT Professor Ken Hale and other endangered language linguists, language death has not merely figured in academic discourse; it has been recognized by the respective governments in many states, including India, as a societal problem that needs to be urgently and seriously addressed. But state action can succeed only if it has genuine support from the people, which is true of all societal issues in democracies. We think it may not be unreasonable to say that it is a kind of moral responsibility of those speech communities whose languages are safe to make sincere efforts to do something by way of affirmative action for the languages under threat, which are spoken by the marginalized speech communities in the neighborhood. Some sensitive speakers of endangered languages, who, not very long ago, had to shift to safe languages under compelling circumstances, appear to suffer from a feeling of disturbed identity, which sometimes leads to a lack of self-confidence.
Now, in the context of our country, what kind of realistic, enabling action can be taken to save endangered languages? It may sound very unfeeling and unjust, but the fact remains that not all severely endangered languages can be saved from extinction. When Boa Sr died, she was the last speaker of the Bo language. When a language reaches a stage where there are just a handful of speakers left, the rest having shifted to safe languages, it cannot be saved. So, an unsentimental and reasonable plan of action would be to classify the languages under threat into two broad categories: (a) those that have a good chance of being preserved, and (b) those that are so severely endangered – at the “moribund” state, using UNESCO terminology – that they cannot be saved. This distinction may exist in the minds of many endangered language scholars, activists, and policymakers themselves, but they do not say so in public – quite understandably, because it would be politically incorrect to do so.
In our view, affirmative action should not be the same for both categories. Perhaps the best way to revitalize an endangered language of category (a) would be to provide it with a domain of use where there would be no alternative to it. This can happen if the State ensures that primary education is imparted in the child’s mother tongue and the adults of the concerned speech community attain literacy in their own language. Equally important is the need for strong social support, as mentioned earlier. Endangered language activists should use every platform to sensitize the speakers of the relevant dominant language(s) about the importance of preserving the languages under threat. At the same time, they must try to persuade the leaders of the community of endangered language speakers that for quality education, there is no substitute for education in the mother tongue at the early stages. The preparation of teaching material for primary school children, based on sound pedagogical principles, teachers’ manuals, storybooks, etc., in such languages must become the academic part of endangered language activism. If the preservation of a certain language is the objective, rather than the archiving of that language, then the documentation of those resources of the language that are directly needed for the preparation of teaching materials at the primary education level must receive priority: basic vocabulary, including the more commonly used words, word formation devices, basic sentence construction rules, and conversational interactions in a variety of day-to-day situations, for instance. Our endangered language projects concerned with the languages of category (a) must focus on these activities and not take up projects not directly related to the preparation of teaching materials, and the competent authority should ensure that this happens so that time and effort are not dissipated. It must also be ensured that the teachers of such languages, who for quite some time would have to be outsiders to the relevant speech community, must have not only competence in the relevant language but also the right attitude toward it. They must not think that their language is superior to the (endangered) language they are teaching.
Now, the nature of documentation has to be different in the case of more severely endangered languages, which are not in a position to be saved. These languages have to be archived. In the case of such a language, the documentation would be delinked from the production of teaching material and must be exhaustive so that future researchers – linguists, ecologists, historians, including the historians of culture, anthropologists, among others – would have a clear idea of the language. Comprehensive documentation is necessary for yet another reason. It is possible that a future generation of such a language would be interested in reviving their language, although this would be a rather rare case. For that to happen, documentation of only the lexicon and the grammar would be inadequate. A language cannot be revived if only its lexicon and grammar are available. Therefore, documentation must include a range of discourses, both imaginative and knowledge-based.
Incidentally, probably the most well-known case of the revival of a language till now is that of Hebrew. However, it must be noted that it had never really totally gone out of use; it had never become extinct, like, say, Aka-Bo, more recently. In course of time, the use of this developed language got restricted to only sacred domains. Its revitalization has meant its being used in day-to-day conversation and in a range of modern, secular contexts. If that had not happened, which was due, ignoring many details, more to the strong will of the speakers and their collective effort in this direction than anything else, strong support for the language and its development would not have come from the state. Now, this obviously cannot be said for the vast majority of languages under threat today in our country or elsewhere, I suppose.
If that is the case, then the question would arise as to why spend money and effort on languages that belong to the (b) category that can only have an archival life? But is that unimportant? Isn’t the knowledge that such a language embodies unimportant? Isn’t that knowledge the knowledge of the way people lived and negotiated with their world once upon a time? Isn’t the knowledge of the distant past of one speech community, in some sense, part of the knowledge-history of all humans?
There are perhaps no rational answers to these questions. So the State must make its own choice. By the way, is the concept of “rational” really objective when applied to life in the real world? Let’s not get into a debate and leave the matter at that for now.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own)
Prof. B.N.Patnaik
Retd. Professor of Linguistics and English, IIT Kanpur
Email: [email protected]
(Images from the net)