The danger of 'phonocide'

All over the world, the International Mother Language Day is celebrated on February 21. This year, the theme is "linguistic diversity and multilingualism as a tool for achieving sustainable development".

In order to foster sustainable development, learners should have access to education in their mother tongues' and in other languages. It is only through the mastery of the first language or the mother tongue that the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy are acquired. Indigenous languages with the capacity to transmit cultural values and traditional knowledge play an important role in promoting sustainable futures.

Even though the United Nations has recognised the important role of local languages, the irony is that 99% of the negotiations on SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) were done in English and 100% of the outcomes of negotiations were written in English! As Cristina Diez, a United Nations representative of the Fourth World Movement said, "in this process, we have already excluded billions of people. At least in delivering the SDGs, it is critical to reflect on the processes to include those who are most vulnerable".

The UNESCO lists 2,465 languages facing the threat of extinction, of which India has a list of 197 languages under threat - more than any other country in the world.

Approximately 7,000 languages are spoken in the world, of which more than 50% are likely to go extinct within a few generations. As the digital era has become omnipresent, less than 100 languages are part of this virtual world.

Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. Promoting the policy of multilingualism will foster solidarity based on mutual understanding, tolerance and providing opportunity towards meaningful dialogue within diverse groups in society.

India is one of those rare countries in which the proactive policies of the government at the Centre and in the states have supported the cause of strengthening multiple languages. Perhaps, we are the only country in the world where the government has recognised 22 official languages.

At state level, learning multiple - two or three - languages has become a norm in the educational system. Beyond the formal education system, in daily lives the common people learn and speak more than two languages.

Despite these proactive policies to support language diversity, why is it that so many languages are facing the threat of extinction in India? The Census of 2011 identified 122 languages spoken by 10,000 or more people. The People's Linguistic Survey of India has identified 780 languages across the country.

Globalisation, with its emphasis on a narrow language base, is one of the most dominant factors that are forcing the minority languages into the background, forcing them out of circulation. As we are part of the global economic and cultural network, in order to build successful careers and businesses, it has become essential to acquire skills to communicate in English to become part of the global network.

Inevitably, the craze of a majority of the people in India to send their children to English medium schools is justified in order to be successful in reaping the economic, social and financial benefits offered by the job market.

This negates the theory of linguistic experts who claim that "the key to preservation of multilingualism has been the recognition of the first languages of the child, the language that the child brings to the classroom."

From the pedagogical point of view, learning of a language other than one's own mother tongue would increase cognitive flexibility. However, in reality, the teaching of English in our educational institutions is so ill-equipped that it has had a negative impact due to the low quality of teaching skills.

This explains the cause for the failure of the policy of government towards supporting multiple languages. We may have the largest number of official languages in the world, but at the ground level, the languages of marginalised indigenous tribal communities have continuously faced the onslaught of cultural domination from state-sponsored languages like Hindi or Odia.

The survival of these communities in the tribal hinterland is under threat due to the conflict over natural resources. Their worldview espoused and manifested in the local language gets decimated once their survival base is threatened or appropriated by the development lobby.

Ironically, even if the SDGs are translated into their tribal languages, the erosion of their worldview is ultimately a step that takes the local language towards extinction. In order to conserve the language, we need to conserve the community and the resources on which they depend for survival.

As Ganesh Devy puts it, "It takes centuries for a community to create a language, and they are the cultural heritage of humanity. Therefore, it is our collective responsibility to ensure that they do not face the phonocide let loose in our time"