An ode to a dying language

An ode to a dying language

Context:

•  India is one of the great repositories of languages.

Death of a culture

• The death of a language in particular has a particular poignancy.
• Newspapers often report the death of a last tribal speaker, scarcely mentioning the death of a culture that preceded it.
• There is a hypocrisy and ambivalence which captures modernity’s attitude to the obsolescent and near extinct.

Disappear of languages:

• Futurists warn that over 3,000 languages might disappear over the next ten years.
• The danger to minority languages and oral languages is high.
•  Almost any census on languages is a ritual of mourning.
• Development and the institutions of development like school mutually guarantee the disappearance of minority languages and dialects.

People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PSLI):

• One group that is steadfastly fighting to keep languages alive is the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PSLI).
•  India is an oral society that understands the culture of orality.
• Today one needs to create a new social contract between orality, textuality and digitality to keep pluralism alive.
• The PLSI also noted that extinction of a language and the death of ecology often goes together.
• In India coastal languages are dying as the coast and the livelihoods of the coast are being destroyed ecologically and culturally.

Losing a language:

• Losing a language is losing a cosmology, a set of myths, rituals of competence.
• Yet no cost-benefit ever calculates the cultural cost of language extinction.
• India is one of the great repositories of language in the world.
• A language disappears as a new generation enters modernity, abandoning memory and older forms of competence.

World languages in danger:

• 230 languages have become extinct since 1950.
• Needs a kaleidoscope of spaces where different languages are juxtaposed and one switch between them as one shifts context.
• Translation too becomes an important act of citizenship.
• Local and regional languages are translated into English but one rarely thinks of translating from Tamil to Spanish.
• One needs to move to a more polyglot world to sustain a vision of diversity.
• Language loss is a part of a bigger problematic of diversity.

Way ahead:

• Need a notion of heritage which can save agricultural and linguistic diversity together.
• Need to invent a citizenship and a commons of cultures as part of our democratic imagination.
• A people need to feel a language is relevant, possesses dignity, and provides competence, identity and meaning for it to survive.
• Needs a special prayer for a language going extinct.