Call of Languages in Danger!

Call of Languages in Danger!

Language is a unique fabrication of human evolution and history. With it, human being came to be aware of its thinking quality and communication with each other. Through the language the human has magnificent power of understanding environment and nature. There can be calculated many qualities of human being which he/she/ got because of language learning but we here are to address some issues languages which are on the danger list.

There is a Navajo nation in Latin America. That nation is spread in four states of American south-western part; the language of that nation is dying. It was seen that most of the speakers of that language are middle-aged or elderly. Although many Navajo youngsters are admitted in schools and are getting education but language in the schools is English, or they are given education in English. Furthermore, in their states, sign boards, market goods and even their own newspapers are all in English, instead of their native language. The linguists are of the opinion that in coming hundred years no Navajo speaker would be there.

Navajo is not the single language in that list. According to an estimation half of the world’s 6800 languages are likely to disappear within two generations. In that way one language dies in every ten days. This kind of incident never happened before in the history of the universe that the linguistic diversity has shriveled so rapidly. An evolutionary Biologist at the University of Reading says that there are three or four languages dominating the world. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

Seclusion rears linguistic diversity:  as a result, the world is infused with languages spoken by only a few people. There are only 250 languages out of 6,800 languages, which have more than 1 million speakers, and at least 3,000 languages have less than 2,500 speakers. There is not only the issue of the languages that have fewer speakers to disappear but Navajo is the language that has 150,000 speakers yet it is on top in languages in danger. What makes languages in danger is not only the matter of number of speakers but also the oldness of the languages. It is believed that if the language is spoken by the children, it is relatively safe. According to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Centre, in Fairbanks, languages that are spoken by only elderly people are in great danger.

Then there rises a question that why do people reject the language of their parents and land? It is because of crisis f confidence in the small communities, when living alongside larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

Change does not come always voluntarily. Quite frequently, the governments remain involved in killing off the minority or smaller languages banning its use in offices, schools and trade centre and keeps on discouraging such languages on the cost of promoting national languages, often languages spoken by dominant peoples. Its main example can be seen in former US policy of adopting English in Indian reservation schools at the place of Navajo, thus that language in this way was put to death. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics department at the University of Chicago, argues that deadliest weapon is not government policy, economic globalization. ‘Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,’ he says. ‘They can not refuse to speak English.’ But the question is that can languages be saved or are worth saving? In that context, it can be said that with the vanishing of those languages there is loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on the comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language is no more, it is lost to science.

Language it also intimately bound with culture. Consequently, the loss of one is loss of other too. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’ Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world,’ says Pagel. There is clear-cut evidence that learning a language physiologically brings change in brain. ‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance,’ Pagel says and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’

Although the linguists have carried out efforts but many languages will disappear over the next century. But there is the hope in the growing interest of linguists and people that may prevent to prove the prediction untrue. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue, as well as the dominant language,’ says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. ‘Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of bilingualism,’ he says. There is an example of enlivening the Maori language by starting classes in children that rekindled interest in it and stopped the erosion of this language. There is another such approach in Hawaii, which produced 8,000 new speakers of Polynesian languages in past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Those who came as volunteer ‘apprentices’ pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered language. In this direction, they after spending 300 hours of training with them become able to transmit the language to the next generation sufficiently fluent. But Mufwene is of the opinion that preventing a language from dying is not same as giving it new life by using it in every day life. ‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in a jar,’ he says.

However in the way of preserving the language comes back from its death. So, there are examples of written languages which survived and then revived by the new generations. For that, written form of any language is essential. So, the mere possibility of revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems writing where none existed before.

In this context, there are several languages in Asia, which are to perish out soon. According to a study one fifth of the 30 languages in province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will die out in next couple of years, says Mohammad Ali Khan, ‘because there are only several hundred persons left speaking these language.’ In this category, the languages such as part of Indo-Iranian languages include Iranian: Northwestern Ormure, Southeastern Pashto, Pamir, Wakhi, Yidgha, Peraian, Sarikoli, Hindko, Badeshi etc. whereas in Indo Arian languages include: Kanneri, Katawert, Pahari, Rajhstani, Gojri, Urdu, Kalasha, Khowar and others include.  These figures were revealed in Gamdhara- Hindko board conference. It was told that languages such as Yidgha of Chitral are recently declared endangered language by UNESCO because their speakers are less than 2000. Ushojo is another endangered language that is surprisingly spoken by less than 200 people. Thus, in the moot there was great call for saving the languages which are said to be the in the last breaths.