Beware! Thousands of languages face extinction

In Pakistan still there is simmering tension among the speakers of Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi and Pushtu; in Sri Lanka, between Sinhala and Tamil; and in Nepal, among Nepali, Newari and Bhojpuri.

In India, the introduction of English at the vernacular medium schools had been a thorny issue in the states and language riots have been fought in this country. There is a widespread assumption that a nation cannot accommodate more than one language without paying a social price.
The fear of balkanisation – that bilingualism will divide and disrupt, fostering tribal loyalties and misunderstanding between groups – has garnered much support for English. But are we sensitive enough to our multilingual culture? Many languages are at stake. In October 2006 in the 10th annual conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages in association with the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, one of the factors cited for language endangerment was ‘ill-conceived and short-sighted language planning policies’ which might contribute to environmental imbalance and instability.

It reflected on how languages of many tribal groups of India, home to more than a thousand languages and dialects, belonging to different races like the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric and Mongoloid  practicing different belief systems and representing different cultural ethos are facing extinction due to the smallness of their population, lack of political power and poor socio-economic conditions.
The Census of 2001 listed 1,652 mother tongues and a few hundred languages (around 400 languages or so) all neatly classified under the four major language families of India.
A Unesco report last year on the state of languages says that about 2,500 of the world’s 6,900 languages are endangered and many of them may not survive for long. What is alarming is that India – a nation with great linguistic diversity – tops the list of countries having the maximum number of dialects on the verge of extinction with 196 threatened languages.

 Over 95 per cent of the world’s population now speak 15 languages, relegating thousands of others to the dustbin of history. Bio-mathematician Pagel and linguistic scholar David Crystal predicted that in the next 50 years, 90 per cent of over 6,000 languages of the world will disappear if no action is initiated to preserve them.
Crystal enlisted 500 of the world’s languages to have less than 100 speakers, and 1500 to have less than 1000. Most of the world’s language heterogeneity (96 per cent of it) is under the ‘stewardship’ of a very small number of people (4 per cent of the world’s population). A project to safeguard the endangered languages of India was taken up in April 2007 under the 11th five year plan.

Rob Schultheis, a veteran American war correspondent, gave us a unique example of the dangers of language gap in the ill-justified WMD war against Iraq. He blamed Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks and company for doing nothing to increase the number of available Arabic speakers in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
 When the 82nd Airborne first occupied Fallujah and set up a command post in a local school, a crowd of parents gathered, shouting demands that US troops move to a different building so their children could return to school the next day. “To the Airborne troops a bunch of Arabs yelling “give us back our school!” sounded like “Kill the infidel Crusaders!”

The troops panicked and opened fire, killing and wounding dozens and triggering an escalating cycle of violence that eventually resulted in the virtual destruction of an entire city, home to nearly half a million people. Schultheis rues that American soldiers have been given almost no training in the local customs, language or way of life either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 Soldiers react recklessly to every perceived threat and use air power against insurgents at the slightest provocation. As our Union home minister P Chidambaram is all set to launch the Operation Green Hunt against the Maoists, has he factored in the importance of learning tribal languages?

Multilingualism is so culturally entrenched in India that it is useless to cite instances of Germany, Japan and China which could ignore English as a necessary prop for progress. The social value of English as a language of universal communication must be understood without a sense of schizophrenia by language zealots such as Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan, SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav or chauvinist fringes like Raj Thackeray of MNS.

But sensitivity to local languages and cultures can go alongside English which can again provide lexical support in interlinking them. Loss of languages would not only be an anthropological disaster but would also create a communication gap between the state and its people preventing it from understanding its people better and mitigating their problems. Millions of our tribal populations are divided into hundreds of distinct groups and it is about time that we learned to hear their languages.