A most disturbing report has been made public through the collaborative efforts of Australian and British institutions that between 50 per cent and 90 per cent of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages will disappear by 2150. Already, half of the people of the world now speak just 24 of these languages.
Languages, it has been noticed, are steadily becoming extinct since 1700. Nine languages are reported to be disappearing every year. This has caused so much concern worldwide that the United Nations has declared the current decade as International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In this backdrop, some good news has come. It has been recently discovered that a small ageing population of a few thousand people near Turkey’s Black Sea coast still speak the old Greek language that Greeks in the Homeric age used. This language is called Romeyka which is different from modern Greek. Linguists are calling it a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world. They claim if this language vanishes from the earth, it would be a great blow to human civilisation. However, the stark reality is some languages are in even bigger trouble, with 350 that have fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 that have just one.
In such a bleak scenario, a sort of easy-to-use recording technology is being employed to save Romeyka language. The plan is to find out if there are pockets of Romeyka speakers in other parts of the world.
One of the reasons for the disappearance of languages is colonialism and political persecution, which disperse populations and suppress them. The paradox is that big cities that have grown as a result of colonialism have helped the survival of even the smallest of languages. The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) has tracked down and mapped hundreds of languages in New York. Among its more startling findings is that of 700 surviving speakers of the language called Seke, which originated in a cluster of mountain villages in Nepal, more than 150 can be traced to two apartment buildings in Brooklyn.
It is laudable indeed to record and archive endangered languages even though, among linguists, a debate is raging whether they deserve to be preserved at all costs. According to one school of opinion, losing any language is “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.” On the other hand, a Cambridge professor working on the Romeyka project, says it is entirely up to the speakers of a language to decide whether to pass on their tongue to future generations.
Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies. No human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. More than race or religion, language is a window on to the deepest levels of human diversity. Some languages may specialise in talking about melancholy, seaweed or atomic structure. Other languages represent thousands of ways of seeing, understanding and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.
Users of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, English and the like have often proclaimed their languages holier, more perfect or more adaptive than the unwritten, unstandardised dialects. But from a linguistic point of view, no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior. The vast majority have always been oral.
Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are not based on anything real about the languages themselves, but on the power, class or status of the speakers. India is no stranger to this phenomenon. While there are attempts to promote Hindi as the country’s main lingua franca, virulent protests are often made from South India, against what is clearly imposition of Hindi.
At a time when catastrophic environmental changes are engulfing the planet, it is heartening that a project has been undertaken for recording the wisdom of linguistic communities that might be vanishingly small on their own, but which together speak more than half of the world’s surviving languages. From the Arctic to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the ways in which people express themselves reveal ancient ways of living in nature. Concerted efforts need to be made by governments if the vanishing languages are to survive.