By Bianca Nongkynrih
Language, whether spoken or signed, is the thread that weaves through society and culture. On this International Mother Language Day, I want to bring focus to our mother languages, to create a space where we can celebrate them and ensure their survival.
Expanding beyond a means of communication, language offers insights into who we are, our identities, our emotions, our cultures, and much more. The diversity that the state of Meghalaya harbours has led to a thriving multicultural community of individuals who live in harmony with mutual respect for each other’s customs, traditions, and languages. As residents of this beautiful state, it is important for us to recognise how important each of our languages and their varieties are, and to play active roles in the protection of these languages enabling them to demonstrate a resilience that can prevent their loss.
Among the seven thousand languages spoken and signed all over the world today, experts believe that over half of them will be lost within the next century, and among these, it is the languages that belong to the Indigenous communities that are most threatened. Various factors contribute to language loss, emerging from a combination of internal and external causes. External causes can include language policies, colonisation, globalisation, etc., while internal causes include how languages are used within the community. One of the most important indicators of language loss is the intergenerational transmission of languages, which refers to the transmission of a language from one generation to the next. Languages begin the process of disappearing when grandparents and grandchildren no longer share a common language for communication. Therefore, to protect our languages, we must ensure that our young ones continue to learn and use them.
Preventing the loss of our languages can begin at home. However, many of us have enabled foreign languages to seep through our walls and enter our kitchens and living rooms, leaving little space for our mother languages. Navigating language use in a multilingual home can be challenging, with one of the easiest solutions to be using a shared language like English. While the multilingual language acquisition discourse is extensive and covers various theories of how children learn languages, in this instance, I focus only on the families who belong to the same language community. Parents and caregivers have a duty to their languages to ensure that they pass on their languages to future generations by speaking to them in their languages and creating a space where they can gain native competence in their languages. While I do not doubt that speaking English can offer opportunities and the ability to connect on a global scale, it is important to ensure that children continue to use their own languages, develop an affinity to these languages, expand their vocabularies, and have a perspective of the world that can be seen through these languages.
By using our languages and passing them on to our young ones, we can prevent the loss of our languages and protect our identities, our culture, our knowledge systems, our history, and all that our languages encompass. As speakers of Indigenous languages, we rarely have the space or the resources to let our languages prosper outside of the home and the community, but with the constant support we give to our languages we can influence the language policies that are introduced to favour our languages and to champion their survival. This International Mother Language Day I hope to raise awareness of how our languages are deeply rooted in who we are, and while most of us have grown to be comfortable using foreign languages, we must seek a path that enables us to become just as comfortable using our languages beyond casual discourse.
There is no measure for the greatness of a language, but we can ascribe greatness to our languages by continually using them with each other, and most importantly with our young ones, for they will play an important role in their preservation. We must make a conscious effort to use our languages at home, and anytime we are in conversation with a member of the same language community. Maximising language use at every opportunity will be crucial to survival. It is only through continued use that our languages can thrive and grow. Speaking languages like English can seem like the easier option, particularly in a multilingual community like ours. However, preventing the endangerment of our languages can bear more fruit for our communities, although it may require more effort. While languages like English offer an instrumentality crucial to opportunity, its use should not be at the expense of the languages that offer a connection to our ancestors, our cultures and our identities. No external force alone can determine the future of a language, and as active members of the community, we play the most influential role in steering the course of our languages’ futures. In starting a conversation on the prevention of language loss, it is also important to recognise that languages go through the process of evolution, just as in our societies. We must learn to embrace the evolution that we see in our languages and enable them to flourish along with the changes in modern society while striking a balance that does not leave our languages vulnerable to these changes.
Imagine a future where no one speaks our languages, how then can we describe our customs and traditions in foreign languages that lack the vocabulary that encapsulates the importance of these customs and traditions? Our languages and our cultures are deeply intertwined and the loss of one can be a harbinger for the loss of the other. The use of our languages is therefore imperative to our Indigenous knowledge and belief systems. It is not my intention to reprimand those who speak foreign languages on this International Mother Language Day, rather I write this article to remind everyone, and myself, to continue to speak our languages, to carry forth a pride that seeps through our communities and shines bright in the languages that we speak, enabling a declaration of survival in a world that seeks to leave the minority forgotten and obsolete.
(The writer graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from St. Anthony’s College, Shillong and has a Master’s Degree in LInguistics from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She aspires to continue contributing to the field of Linguistic research through research on the Khasi language and its varieties)