With 7000 living languages across the world, 1075 are at a risk of diminishing by this century, while another 540 have died. The death of languages, while others being at the forefront of vanishing, arise questions: what leads the languages to go vanished? How much do the speakers of the languages contribute towards killing their own languages? Are the mother tongue(s) a barrier to get desired national or state results? Yet it remains a mystery: why do linguistic groups, or nations, fail to secure what they inherit? Or is it a conspiracy and dominance of other languages that downtrodden the weak or stateless and regional languages?
Basically, a mother tongue is a native language with ethnical roots connecting to the past. It is a source to express oneself in the best possible terms. As proved through various scientific researches and a United Nations survey that “a child is brightly brought up if taught in their own mother language in initial phase”, it becomes imperative for states to practice the possibility of creating intellectual mindsets. While discouraging the children’s education in a second or additional language, particularly in the primary level, the UN refers states to manage the educational curriculum in the given language(s).
Out of 2296 languages being spoken in Asia only, 38% languages are at an increasing risk of waning. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in Asia, and across the world, has 707 languages, where 49% languages are in peril to perish: followed by Malaysia where out of 136 languages, 18% are to disappear in the foreseeable future. With such an enlarging number of language dangers, the world is, on the other hand, directly or indirectly, transforming into language hegemony of the powerful languages.
US views poverty, migration, job loss, and syntax as the leading causes towards the destruction of languages. In fact, languages of small indigenous trivial communities are often ignored. They are never used in public or educational life. In other words, another foreign, or local language, influences and vanishes the given language(s) so as to remain above. Koro, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in India’s Arunachal Pradesh, is just used by the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is at the greatest verge of culmination in the Indian Territory.
At times, we, the humans, think of ‘no-contribution’ of the mother languages in our lives other than the means of communication. Consequently, we adopt another language and devalue ours. When our language dies, or gets to diminish sometime soon, we lose a whole bit of intellectualism among the people of the given linguistic group. A culture and creativity only progress when their language remains alive. With a language’s death, dies a national identity. And unfortunately, we are the determinants in killing our own languages by making the foreign languages compulsory in educational institutions.
