Indian linguists tell how to save languages from dying

Karthick Narayanan, who has been documenting the Toda tribe for over a year, says farming and leasing heritage land for farming and related activities have become their main source of livelihood

Language: Toda
To preserve: Videos and audio bytes of folklore tradition

Earlier this month, when Chetan Acharya, president of the Konkani Bhasha Mandal, heard of Konkani's dwindling numbers, as per data the 2011 census, he was both disappointed and puzzled. "For the last 26 years, we have been working tirelessly towards promoting Konkani through various activities, and were happy to learn that Goa and Karnataka had shown healthy signs of growth. But, the problem areas turned out to be Maharashtra and Gujarat," says Acharya, who says the organisation has focussed much of its work on children's literature in order to encourage pride in the mother tongue. While the activities may be on in full steam in Konkani-speaking pockets of the country, the official figures belie the efforts.

According to the 2001 census, there were 24,89,015 Konkani speakers. Now, the numbers have dropped by 2,32,513. "When people migrate to metros, they prefer to identify with the dominant language of the region, in order to get an edge in employment opportunities," says Mumbai's Dr Chandrashekhar Shenoy, theatre actor and president of the Akhil Bharatiya Konkani Parishad, the parent body of Konkani organisations across the country. "While sometimes the techniques of data collection by the Census are suspect, there's no denying that Konkani being a minority language needs attention," he says. This August, the Jagotik Konknni Songhotton or the Global Konkani Organisation, is set to chalk out a plan of action to reverse the trend.

Language: Koro Aka Hruso Aka
To preserve: Talking dictionaries and digital workshops

A speaker of Hruso Aka at the annual Netchii Dow festival in Thrizino in 2015; (inset) Dr Gregory DS Anderson and Dr Bikram Jora in Arunachal Pradesh

Konkani is not the only Indian language under threat. According to language expert Ganesh Devy, who documented 780 Indian languages while conducting the People's Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, found 600 of these were dying. What's more disconcerting is that 250 languages in India have died in the last 56 years, according to the Vadodra-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre. Which brings us to the question, what does it take to save a language?

Putting it on paper
Professor Anvita Abbi, who formerly worked at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is currently a guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, has dedicated her life to languages. In 2000, she identified the Great Andamanese, which is genealogically different from the rest of the languages of the Andamanese tribes. This was subsequently verified by the population genetic studies.

Language: Luro and Sanenyo
To preserve: Documenting grammar

Professor Anvita Abbi (inset) and her team say the vocabulary of the young generation is very different

"After five years of research, I evolved a script based on Devanagari with modifications to suit the sounds of the language. We called it the English-Great Andamanese-Hindi dictionary, the first of its kind, to document the language on the islands," she says. Currently, she is working on a two-year project to document Luro and Sanenyo, the two languages spoken in Chowra and Teressa islands in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. "It's a hard life when you are on these islands because there are no amenities. And you have to be there to spend a considerable amount of time in order to forge a bond with the locals," she says. According to 2011 census, 2,500 people speak Luro and there are 2,000 Sanenyo speakers.

Rahul Pachori, a student of linguistics at JNU, who is also working with Abbi on the Sanenyo project, says what made their job easy was access to translators from Port Blair. "Luro and Sanenyo are not taught in schools, and for the sake of education and jobs, they are forced to learn Hindi, which is why the new generation can't speak the mother tongue. The vocabulary of the young generation is very different," says Pachori.

Documenting languages also gives a glimpse into a culture lesser known "We observed that the Andaman tribes are community-driven, their loyalties go beyond the immediate family. And this is reflected in their language which doesn't have many terms for familial relationships. There's no mama, chacha, etc. For them, every older man is referred to as yom, and an older woman as ta, which also doubles up as mother," says Vysakh R, another research student from Delhi, working on Luro.

Going digital
Miles away in Arunachal Pradesh, there seems to be an ever-expanding imprint of Hindi. It's something that Dr Gregory DS Anderson, who runs non-profit research institute conducting linguistic workshops to empower language activists, found out in 2016 through a documentation project for the Tibeto-Burman languages Koro Aka and Hruso Aka. He and a colleague Dr Bikram Jora, spent a couple of weeks in West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh. Massive data sets on languages Bangru and Puroik were collected that are being processed to preserve the languages of Arunachal Pradesh online.

"One starts with the basics of the language and expands from there," Anderson tells us in an email interview. "Eventually we held a training workshop for Hruso Aka and Koro Aka in Guwahati to teach computer literacy, audio recording and data processing, doc use in language documentation, how to record and use metadata, etc. and built the beginnings of online Talking Dictionaries to give a first ever presence to the communities online," he says. During the course of his stay, he realised that most communities there, like the Hruso and Miji, were unaware of how dire the situation is.

"We are witnessing a situation where the shift is rapid and for many it will be too late unless real efforts are made to stop this shift to only Hindi by the younger people. Arunachal Pradesh stands to go from one of the most linguistically diverse to a monolingual Hindi area in the space of two or three generations," he says. Anderson believes this shift is explicitly the result of the "promotion of Indian nationalist identity in the post-colonial period". According to him, the shift to Hindi began only after Independence, and in many ways is the result of development schemes. "It sought to strip undesirable tribal characteristics from the tribal communities, and to integrate these communities as well-constructed citizens of India."

The move to digital has also helped document the folk, oral traditions of many Indian languages. The Todas, a small pastoral community that inhabit the Nilgiri Plateau in South India, today number somewhere between 700 to 900 individuals. Karthick Narayanan, a PhD student who has been documenting their oral history for Sahitya Akademi's Center for Oral and Tribal literature, Delhi, says while previously the lack of documentation (of their existence) has led to lands being usurped from them - their villages were submerged due to the construction of a dam - this documentation exercise might finally give them a presence. The once forgotten community, he hopes, will find a recall value.

25
The no. of languages that have died in India in the last 56 years, according to the Vadodra-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre

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