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Date: Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 5:28 AM
Subject: Fwd: Language war ~ most of the languages are on the verge of extinction
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Date: Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:00 AM
Subject: Language war ~ most of the languages are on the verge of extinction
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Language parliament breaks new ground, for policy relook
11 March 2010
Shiv Karan Singh
VADODARA, 11 MARCH: In the first meeting of its kind, representatives of over 300 languages from each state of the country, as well as scholars, activists, and administrators, gathered in Vadodara this week to discuss problems and solutions related to the survival of their respective languages and linguistic communities. The three-day meeting titled "Bhasha Confluence at Ground Zero", organised under the aegis of Dr GN Devy by the Bhasha Academy, is a landmark event in the history of the nation.
Since the linguistic wars of the 1950s and 60s, India has struggled to come to terms with its linguistic diversity and aspirations. The prevention of the emergence of new states on linguistic lines and the majoritarianism inherent in India's democratic system has had the dubious distinction of strangling most of the country's languages. In 2009, Unesco reported that India has the most endangered languages in the world (196), but the Indian government has intiated little to even begin addressing this fact. The commingling of disparate linguistic communities like Katkari, Mundari, Kokborok, Koren, Ho, Bhili, Biate at the Bhasha Confluence this week represents the first consolidated nation-wide attempt of communities to share grassroots and policy ideas to protect its wealth in languages.
During the inaugural session, JNU professor Ms Anvita Abbi said "languages do not die with age, they only get more rich in time. They are killed by either policies or by the choices made by their speaker." Professor Abbi, informed the attendees of the two-language families of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that have suffered from insensitive policies since Independence, and spoke of the demise, in January this year, of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of the Bo language. According to Professor Abbi, by the end of her life Boa Senior started conversing with birds in her language, saying only they understood her.
Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan, on the other hand, specified that the conference was not about dying languages, but the recognition and celebration of those living. Democracy has to be a celebration of difference, it by definition it has to be multilingual, and by recognizing our languages itself we can begin a democratization of our democracy, said Mr Vishwanathan.
The mood of the conference was indeed one of celebration; the uniqueness and richness of each language was continually underlined and English and Hindi also shared equal democratic space with myriad tribal and lesser known languages.
At the end of the opening session, participants marched in celebration upholding placards of all the languages represented through the streets of Vadodara.
Day two of the conference was conducted at the Tejgarh Aadivasi Academy, where participants broke up into small groups to deliberate individual and collective issues before pooling ideas before the entire gathering. The Statesman caught up with Mr. Morup Namdyal from Ladakh, who had braved immense difficulties to arrive at Vadodara for the conference. Mr Namdyal shared information about the immense diversity in languages of Ladakh, mentioning how Dardi and Skatlok languages had vanished from his region.
Participants learned about the myriad realities of individual languages in India, such as the politics of Kokborok language in Tripura, how Mundari language primers created under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Jharkhand have not yet made it out of children's bags, and how Kashmiri is under severe stress is Kashmir itself.
In terms of policy, some ideas resonated throughout the deliberations. One centred around the poverty of the nation's three-language formulae. Dr DP Pattnaik, the nation's most eminent linguist, spoke of how this three-language programme, meant to address a certain reality, mistakenly morphed into a policy in 1986, while Dr Rajesh Sachdeva, director of Central Institute of Indian Languages, specified how this formulae only support dominant languages at the cost of mother tongues. Another recurrent motif, was the need of a new linguistic survey of India. Professor Lachmand Khubhchandani put it this way: "If you can't count your languages, what will you save?"
Noted writer and activist, Maheshweta Devi, belabored the point that every government official presiding over a tribal area should be pressed to learn the tribal language. Eminent Gandhian activist Mr Narayanbhai Desai urged attending language speakers to work towards safeguarding their own communities, environments, and correcting inequalities without which no government policy could protect their languages
--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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