To forget is to kill

Every civilization has its own way of communicating through its generations. Monuments, sculptures, idols etc. are only the creations we can see and touch. But more than that they leave behind a language. A language is something that connects each and every one of us to what we are and what we were, for communication is the root cause of all the developments our species has been able to make. But recently I came across something very disturbing.

There are 6,000 languages spoken by humans alive today. According to UNESCO estimates, half of them will go extinct in the next 50 years!

3000 languages, gone. By the time I grow old and the sands of time are about to run empty, 50% of the languages on this planet will die too, says BBC. And unlike plants or animals, which can be conserved and bred, language can only survive if people keep speaking it.

Google however has come up with a language conservation program but then again it will only be an archive of literature, for native speakers have either died out or moved on to another mode of communication.

Somehow it makes me curious. Our violent history of mankind is only but an expansionist theory and somewhere man has always tried to implicate his ways and customs on the weaker counterpart.
And the language is but the heart and soul of every civilization, take that out and after a few decades only tourists will visit the places and click selfies in front of the dilapidated monuments that are left behind.
Take European expansionists for instance, the British, the Spaniards, the French they all went to sea to trade and explore but they explicitly remembered to do one thing without fail, they expanded their culture by teaching their language to those they acquired. Today French is taught in schools here in India but some third world African countries have citizens that are already fluent in French.

After the second world war Germany was divided into the DDR and BRD and the east was under the U.S. of A and the west under the U.S.S.R and today one can clearly see the influence of English and Russian on the native language. This is exactly what happens to the language when the masses move on. The once purely Germanic language today is a mixture of words from all over. Youth today prefer saying ” sorry ” instead of “Es tut mir Leid”, but it is fortunate. For there are many other languages that are suffering a fate that is much worse. Languages like Amurdak of Australia, Apiaka of Brazil and Ainu of japan have just one native speaker left. and when they forget a word, its gone forever. That is the slow process of how a language comes to extinction.
We all studied biology in some point of our lives and have accidentally come across the Latin names of certain entities, Latin, very old language, gone, ever given a thought that as of this day Latin is not spoken on the streets of Rome anymore, where at one point on the grounds of which an entire empire was built.

Nature is like water. It tries to calm down as soon as the disturbance settles down. Similarly when a world was without communication and networking people who lived in small groups developed their own language and in wider areas they developed different dialects of the same. And with globalization comes this need for simplicity of communication.
We have seen the euro, the one currency used by a number of nations, god knows when but amero is also something that is being thought of. If currencies can become common, then the day is not far that the forth coming generations shall see one global currency and one global language. ( if they don’t go to war and kill each other on the way!)

Lets look at it the other way round. Some groups of the human population are pretty tight on sticking to their own language take China, Russia and North Korea or the Indian state of Tamil Nadu for Instance, they on a certain level despise other languages and are proud rednecks of their own. Not to say that this is wrong. But every coin has to faces. Pros of such attitude are many. The language lives and so does each and every aspect of the culture, The masses are acclimatized to thinking in one language so they respond quickly (how?)
Here’s how, if I ask “What time is it?” to an Indian his brain first decodes this simple question into his native language, then he forms a sentence, does a grammar check and then spits the answer back. Result? Look for yourself.
Coming back, Native speakers are hence on a upper-hand in that case but there is also a flip side. Communication barriers are lurking behind every wall. They have to rely on interpreters and apps for communicating with people outside their ethnic group and hence the concept of being bilingual or multilingual is on a high tide in these days.

We are a generation that has not only begun to globalize but also a generation that survives on a tightly knit global network. But More than 50% of the world’s languages are located in just eight countries: India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Cameroon. In these countries and around them are the areas that are the most linguistically diverse in the world.

Ever been to Dubai? That middle eastern part of the world that doesn’t really feel middle eastern? No matter where you’re from if your English is good you can get along really well.

The main reason languages die out is because native speakers are using it, and they are not being transmitted to their children. They prefer that their children learn the one global language everyone is familiar with.

It is upto the people to choose to be multilingual as then and only then they can preserve a language.
The best example here is of the preservationists who are fighting back in some places. In New Zealand, for example, the Maori have opened nursery schools where elders conduct classes, all in Maori. They call them “language nests.” In Mexico, after refusing to talk to each other for years, the last two surviving speakers of Ayapaneco, a thousand-year-old south American language, recently reunited to try and save their language(do read the article by Chris Taylor on mashable). And several organizations like the “Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages” or National Geographic (click link) are going to great lengths to document and record languages at the brink of disappearance. Even Google is putting its resources at the service of safeguarding linguistic diversity through its Endangered Languages Project (click link).

Is the loss of language just “ethno-linguistic natural selection” or Neocolonialism? It is clear that with the death of a language, there is the loss of a great accepted culture that has once been there before. “Only a few cultures erected grandiose architectural monuments by which we can remember their achievements. But all cultures encode their genius in their languages, stories and lexicons,” says K. David Harrison, author of ‘When Languages Die’.

It is but every persons responsibility to make sure that they pass on their heritage to the forthcoming generations for that is the only way the new ones will still stay connected to its roots.

so as the maori saying goes, Kite wawe ia koe!

The waterman