Book Excerpt: When and why does ‘language death’ occur?
Ganesh Narayan DevyAleph

Book Excerpt: When and why does ‘language death’ occur?

Scholar G N Devy’s new book delves into the multiple linguistic realities of India as a nation
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If democracy does not care for diversity, then it ceases to be a democracy. The heart of democracy is not in agreement, but in having space for debate, in having different views and different ways of looking at the world. This is not a situation unique only to India; rather it is prevalent all over the world. Papua New Guinea had a larger number of languages than India has. In 1961, it had claimed 1,100 languages; today it is not able to speak more than a few hundred languages. The same situation exists in Indonesia and Nigeria; in fact, India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria put together have about half of the world’s languages in existence. But in all these countries with the maximum number of languages in existence, there is a huge amount of language deaths being reported. And what are the processes and consequences of the death of a language? When the last speaker stops speaking or when a large number of speakers migrate out of one language to another one, that’s what makes a language disappear. For example, when the last speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, the Boa Senior Lady, passed away, the language died with her; similarly, when the last Majhi speaker in Sikkim died, the language also ceased to exist. But with the sinking of those words, a tradition of knowledge which has been in existence for thousands of years has also gone down. For some languages, this tradition of knowledge had been 70,000 years old. Occasionally, people inquire about the reasons behind the death of a language. Is the government alone responsible, or the education policy, or is it the poor quality of census that’s responsible? Can it be perceived as an assault of globalisation? Or is it because of colonialism and its after-effects that the languages are in decline? Or can we blame the print technology for that matter? Beyond all these factors, there is a far more substantial explanation to these questions.

Humans have been an evolving species. In the process of that evolution during the last 500,000 years, humans had used only gestures for communication for most part of that long period. Subsequently, they began using tones, textures, and music for communication. But now it appears that humans are moving out of language and towards communication through images. The Broca’s lobe is now showing great fatigue; children no longer wish to either read or write. All over the world, I believe, voice-based language is giving way to an image-based manner or system of communication. We are at a turning point in our evolutionary history. When we arrived at this turning point, since language was the foundation of knowledge, most fields of knowledge also started shifting their epistemic base. In fact, for quite some time now, new disciplines have been emerging, because the nature of knowledge is going to be very different in the coming years. However, we may continue to speak a few words but the ability of the words to carry their respective meaning will be much lower than what it is now. When knowledge is rapidly passing through a major epistemic shift, the state has a major role to play in terms of language policy. It is not sufficient for the state to just declare some awards or set up a few language-research institutions; there are numerous additional considerations about language that the state must address. Humans have amassed knowledge in language for the last 70,000 years through an enormous amount of labour. Each one of us has contributed to its development.

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Book Excerpt: When and why does ‘language death’ occur?

Experience accumulates. Then it stabilizes in cognition through verbal forms or even a pre-verbal but conscious sensation. These verbal forms are exchanged and transacted among the members of a community. Such transactions make the community possible as well. The two are interdependent. Over a period of time, people discover, borrow, and, in some rare instances, invent methods of recording the cognition, as well as systems of representation such as orthography. Orthography is an expensive affair; it has been so all along. It takes several years for a person to acquire command over the rules and the restlessness of systems of representation. Therefore, records of human cognition easily tend to become the monopoly of a certain class which has the ability to buy leisure for their young ones so that they can ‘learn’. This is where human learning and the ‘learning’ in a classroom part ways. History shows that classroom learning generates its own rhetoric to justify the sanctity of its superior cognitive content, more systematic than vulgar sensory experience, which in fact is the basis of all human knowledge. Subsequently, this rhetoric acquires the status of the basic principles in knowledge-systems such as logic, rationality, veracity, and so on. Human history is, in a way, a story of conflict between learning and experience, between the rational and the imaginative, between the left and the right halves of the brain. Knowledge, therefore, is a way of repression. Conservation or preservation of languages needs to be seen as being significantly different from the preservation of monuments. Languages are, as every student of Linguistics knows, social systems. They get impacted by all other contextual social developments. Language as a social system has an objective existence, in the sense that dictionaries and grammars of languages can be prepared, and languages can be transcribed, orthographed, mimeographed, and recorded on a tape by way of documents and objects, but essentially language does not have an existence entirely free of the human consciousness. Therefore, a given language cannot be completely dissociated from the community that uses it. Quite logically, therefore, preservation of a language entails the preservation of the community that puts that language in circulation.

Excerpted with permission from India: A Linguistic Civilization by G N Devy @2024AlephBooks

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