By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: The Khasi language is no longer in danger of facing extinction as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Research Organisation (UNESCO) has withdrawn the language from its list of World’s Languages in Danger published on its website.
According to UNESCO, this language of the Mon-Khmer linguistic branch is spoken by some 900,000 people and is largely spoken in Khasi and Jaintia Hills region of the State.
The UNESCO reassessed the status of the Khasi language wthrough its editorial board and concluded that Khasi may be classified as ‘safe’ on UNESCO’s scale of language vitality.
“Recognized as ‘associate official language’ in the state of Meghalaya since 2005, Khasi is widely used in several domains such as primary and secondary education, radio, television and religion,” the UNESCO website mentions.
While admitting that dialects of Khasi are dying as they are making way for the standardized variant, the UNESCO editorial board acknowledged that ‘the future of this language seems to be assured.’
The UNESCO presently lists 2473 languages spoken around the world on its World’s Languages in Danger list after classifying them in five degrees of vitality — vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct.