When
people lose a way of life, their
language struggles to survive. Exactly what is
lost when a language dies? We also lose what can be called a world-view, the local
knowledge and wisdom of which the language is a repository.
Of the 6,700 surviving languages, most are spoken by very small groups of communities and people. Most of the World’s
languages are spoken in the tropical countries. India is home to about 380 languages. The biodiversity hotspots of the world and the geographical spread of
indigenous peoples and / or languages show a remarkable similarity. Tropical rainforests, the world’s most biodiversity rich areas, were also found to be the most culturally diverse regions. Linguistic diversity seems to be driven by environmental reasons as well as socio-political ones.
When people begin to live close to nature and modify it, they develop a specialized knowledge about their environment. In order to convey this knowledge they develop a vocabulary specific to their
ecological region and context.
The most important factor in the death of a language is globalization. The spread of technology into every corner of the world is exposing once protected pockets of tribal culture to the dominant language in that area. In India, the dominant culture is English (in urban areas) and Hindi (in the hinterland). The media and the educational systems are the real culprits. As formal education reaches more and more people, schools can kill in one generation languages maintained for hundreds of years.
In India, the story is not very different. One-third of the Oraons of central India had abandoned their language, the rate of decline being about 30 to 40 per cent every decade. It is the same for the Gonds of central India whose language is also slowly dying out. Like the Oraons and the Gonds, the Bhils also face a question of sustainable livelihood.
Languages are repositories of knowledge. Over the ages, indigenous peoples have devised ways to farm deserts without irrigation and produce abundance from the rain forest without destroying the delicate balance that maintains the ecosystem. They have explored the medicinal properties of plants and they have acquired an understanding of the basic ecology of flora and fauna. When the languages vanish, the ecological knowledge inscribed in indigenous languages is also lost.
In other words the treasure of knowledge collected by people over years of shared experience would be lost and perhaps needed to be rediscovered.
When ecological values are lost along with the languages, the people left behind are mere shadows of what they once were. Such loss of valuable knowledge is not only the people’s loss, but that of entire mankind. If this knowledge had to be duplicated from scratch, it would be an enormous task. In a sense, environmentalists have to re-invent the wheel. Indigenous people have found out many things that modern science rediscovers, repackages and gives it back to them with a price tag attached to it.
The markets and the governments in the developing world are beginning to comprehend the great economic potential of traditional knowledge. It is now a healthy business worth millions of dollars. But it is all locked in the languages and traditions of the people who have nurtured it for ages.
More summaries about the Article: Words are biotic