{"id":30912,"date":"2018-10-27T11:24:46","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T05:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=30912"},"modified":"2018-10-27T11:24:46","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T05:54:46","slug":"an-ode-to-a-dying-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/an-ode-to-a-dying-language\/","title":{"rendered":"An ode to a dying language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/opinion\/op-ed\/an-ode-to-a-dying-language\/article22882669.ece\"><b>An ode to a dying language<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Context:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">India is one of the great repositories of languages.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Death of a culture<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The death of a language in particular has a particular poignancy.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Newspapers often report the death of a last tribal speaker, scarcely mentioning the death of a culture that preceded it.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is a hypocrisy and ambivalence which captures modernity\u2019s attitude to the obsolescent and near extinct.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Disappear of languages:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Futurists warn that over 3,000 languages might disappear over the next ten years.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The danger to minority languages and oral languages is high.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Almost any census on languages is a ritual of mourning.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Development and the institutions of development like school mutually guarantee the disappearance of minority languages and dialects.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>People\u2019s Linguistic Survey of India (PSLI):<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One group that is steadfastly fighting to keep languages alive is the People\u2019s Linguistic Survey of India (PSLI).<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">India is an oral society that understands the culture of orality.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Today one needs to create a new social contract between orality, textuality and digitality to keep pluralism alive.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The PLSI also noted that extinction of a language and the death of ecology often goes together.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In India coastal languages are dying as the coast and the livelihoods of the coast are being destroyed ecologically and culturally.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Losing a language:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Losing a language is losing a cosmology, a set of myths, rituals of competence.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yet no cost-benefit ever calculates the cultural cost of language extinction.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">India is one of the great repositories of language in the world.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A language disappears as a new generation enters modernity, abandoning memory and older forms of competence. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>World languages in danger:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">230 languages have become extinct since 1950.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Needs a kaleidoscope of spaces where different languages are juxtaposed and one switch between them as one shifts context.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Translation too becomes an important act of citizenship.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Local and regional languages are translated into English but one rarely thinks of translating from Tamil to Spanish.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One needs to move to a more polyglot world to sustain a vision of diversity.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Language loss is a part of a bigger problematic of diversity.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Way ahead:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Need a notion of heritage which can save agricultural and linguistic diversity together.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Need to invent a citizenship and a commons of cultures as part of our democratic imagination.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A people need to feel a language is relevant, possesses dignity, and provides competence, identity and meaning for it to survive.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Needs a special prayer for a language going extinct.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An ode to a dying language Context: \u00a0India 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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/an-ode-to-a-dying-language\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">An ode to a dying language<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30912\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}