A Loss Of Millennia

One can see a varied amount of diversity around themselves wherever they go, be it in food, clothes, architectural work and most importantly in language. We live in a world where language changes every few hundred kilometres. As per a survey conducted by People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), within India, there are 780 different languages but more than 250 languages have died out in the last 50 years. The death of a language is a far more precarious and sensitive topic than one considers, affecting an entire community which has existed from millennia.

Language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. When a language dies, it carries away its culture, traditional practices, knowledge and the customs with it. There hardly stays any traces of the language. There are 7000 different languages all around the world and a saddened possibility of the demise of half of it by the next century. Many of these languages do not even own a literary text, therefore would vanish without any trace making us lose an immense amount of knowledge enclosed in it.

Lack of preservation and globalisation are to blame for dwindling language diversity. There is no doubt that globalisation is proved as a benefaction and gratuity of good fortune, with the connectivity and convenience it provides us. Nevertheless, globalisation has to be slurred for the loss through the process of ‘language shift’. It is shifting from the hereditary language to the dominant language of the area. It comprises of keeping the regional tongue at the stake by giving a study of the dominant language rather than the regional one, in the aspiration of the better and convenient life or in the hope of being able to fit in the civilised society. It starts with the thought provoked in the mind that the regional tongue does not have a future, raising certain questions on their capability.

This topic of ‘death of language’ is put-up in Anita Desai’s In Custody in a very subtle manner. The book was a best seller and was shortlisted for ‘Man Booker Price’. The text is a remarkable piece of art. As Salman Rushdie said, “this text seems to whisper to the reader with a fear of getting lost and a risk of going unheard by the people”. The book puts forth the affair of ‘losing a language’ entangled with other affairs. The novel’s emotion heart lies in Devan’s relationship with Urdu poetry. One could feel Devan’s heart when Nur says to him “how can there be Urdu poetry when there is no Urdu language left”.

There should be certain measures to be taken for the prevention of language and revitalise of the lost ones. Hebrew language in Israel is the only example of a liturgical language that has successfully been revived. One should knock themselves out to save these languages and the culture, history it shares because once these languages are lost it would be a loss of millennia with certainly no possibility of restoration.