Speak up! Our tongues are dying

A silent bell is tolling for many languages in the country, and in the world, and most of them are moving into a world of oblivion, beyond sounds and scripts. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a study undertaken by a research organisation in Vadodara, has found that in the past five decades India has seen the disappearance of 250 languages from common usage. The country was linguistically rich and diverse with 1,100 live languages being spoken by people, according to the 1961 census. After the death of many of them, 400 others are gasping on the tongues of speakers who are getting fewer and fewer. After another 50 years India may be left with only about 450 languages. A Unesco report on the state of languages also said some time ago that about 2,500 of the world’s about 7,000 languages are endangered and may go mute before long.

The death of a language not only destroys the identity of its speakers and disempowers them but diminishes the world, too. Every language is a unique way of looking at and understanding the world, and collectively they are repositories of the world's historical and cultural experience. They are means of self-definition and markers of identity for communities and individuals, and keep social memory alive. But the forces of uniformity and standardisation are sweeping the world of small languages, and as in the case of biological evolution, only the fitter and the stronger ones survive. Languages of communities with political and economic power overwhelm the lesser ones. Those with a numerical edge may also have an advantage. Empires and religions spread not just with swords and guns in hand but with languages on the tongue. That is why imperial speech choked many local languages to death or pushed them into limbo. Over 95 percent of the world's population now speak 15 languages.

It is difficult to save the languages that are vanishing. There are policies which promote the use of some important languages but most do not have any support. The number of people who speak many languages is also decreasing. Efforts must be made to preserve languages and their traditions, but the problem is that they can only be recorded and documented when speakers dwindle. That does not help, because a language which is not spoken and lives in libraries is only a fossil. A language which is lost is lost forever, too. A world which speaks in fewer languages may be less of a Babel, but it loses many meanings, as many tongues become the names of our silences.