LANGUAGES IN DANGER

Although, many languages have come into existence and died away throughout human history, it was only in the 1990’s, following the publication of a series of worldwide surveys, that people began to notice that the rate of disappearance was significantly increasing. The thrust of these facts is easy to summarize, even though it is impossible to be exact. Of the 6000 or so languages in the world, in the course of the present century – an average of one language is dying out every two weeks or so. It is a rate of loss unprecedented in recorded history.

  But, it is important to stress that all dominant languages are involved in the disappearance of the less-spoken and written languages. The impact of dominant languages on minority languages is a matter of universal concern, and the role of English is especially implicated. The growth of English as a global language is not the sole factor in explaining language endangerment. Although, it is English that has been the critical factor in the disappearance of languages in such parts of the world as Australia and North America, this language is of little relevance when we consider the corresponding losses that have taken place in South America or in many parts of Asia, where such languages as Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Chinese have replaced local languages. Nor, for that matter, it is always the chief factor in colonial Africa, where inter-ethnic and inter-religious rivalries at a local level are often the reason for the endangerment of a particular language.

A language dies when the last person who speaks it dies or as some people say, it dies when “the second-last person has nobody to talk to”. A language lives on, after these deaths, only if it has been written down or recorded in some way. When people die, they leave signs for their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds and artifacts – in a word, their archaeology. But, spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies which has never been documented, it is as if it has never been.

In a survey which was published in 1999 by the US Summer Institute of Linguistics Organisation, Ethnologne, there were fifty-one languages with just one speaker left – twenty eight of them in Australia alone. There were 500 languages in the world with fewer than 100 speakers; 1500 with fewer than 1000 speakers; over 3000 languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers; and a staggering 5000 languages with fewer than 1,00,000 speakers. It turns out that 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by just 4% of the people. It is perhaps no wonder that so many languages are in danger. The figure of 1,00,000 in the examples of endangered languages, sometimes takes people by surprise. So, is a language with 1,00,000 speakers safe? The evidence is to the contrary. Such a language is not going to die next week or next year; there is no guarantee that it will be surviving in a couple of generations. It does not take a language long to disappear, once the will to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

The sequence of events affecting the endangered languages seems to be the same everywhere. The main reason can be – the present generation becomes increasingly proficient in the new language, identifying more with it, and finding their first language less relevant to their new needs. This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old languages, on the part of the parents as well as the children. Parents use the old language less and less with their children, or in front of their children, and when more children come to be born within the ‘new society’, there are obviously fewer opportunities to use that language.

Within a generation – sometimes even within a decade – a healthy bilingualism within a family can slip into a self-conscious semi-lingualism, and hence into a mono-lingualism which places that language one step nearer to extinction.

SUBMITTED BY:                  NEERAJA B. SHRINGERI

                                                1^ST SEMESTER, B.A. (H.E.E.)