A mythical imagination in the Bible alludes the linguistic plurality of humans to the wrath of God. Angry with people who had built a city and a tower tall enough to reach the heaven, god baffled them and made their languages different so that they could no longer communicate with each other thus eroding their strength and unity. If this implies that language plurality is a curse on humanity then globalization in the postmodern world is definitely working against it.

There is an increased sense of linguistic homogenization working in the background of the current technoglobalization. World over, several languages have disappeared and are still disappearing. It seems that modernity, especially its neoliberal version, is incapable of sustaining lingual and cultural pluralisms. There is a strong connection between our development models and the subtle discourses they trigger with the issue of language death.

This paper looks into the issue of language death as a discursive phenomenon and an inevitable outcome of modern and neoliberal development models. It addresses the multidimensionality of this model to the extent it actuates and justifies the disappearance of languages and cultures that do not fit into the dominant models. While doing so the paper touches upon a range of issues, among others the oversweeping discourse of skills in higher education, the status of indigenous languages and cultures in our education system, and the vernacularisation of digital technologies. The main focus has been kept on skills and placement perceived as necessary ‘outcomes’ of higher education. The socio-economy of skills is a slayer of linguistic diversity with its overemphasis on formalising human abilities to suit the modern (corporate) occupations and careers. Death of language is a signifier of the aggressive forms of development from where parallel ecosystems and cultural cosmoses are ousted forever.

The curse is certainly ahistorical and the homogenizing effect of globalization needs to be seriously curtailed. All across the world humans have survived in cultures different from each other specifically designed to meet their adaptive mechanisms to the local ecosystems. The centrality of language in culture places it in direct connection with those ecologies. In other words, at the centre of language there is an imagination of nature. This is especially true of indigenous and non-modern languages. Language also consists of materials on how humans interacted with each other and with other cultures. Centuries old knowledge systems and memories of existence travel vertically, from past to present through generations, and horizontally, through spaces.

As languages consistently remind who we are, their disappearance expunges the ‘we’ – ‘We’ as a set of people with a distinct history, distinct culture with distinct practices, non-bureaucratic and undocumented. The history of language death is also a history of the disappearance of several ‘we’s. Just as there were/are multiple ecologies and cultures there are multiple languages in this human world. This ‘linguistic diversity is an essential component for the planet to survive’, according to Skutnabb-Kangas, the Finnish linguist who published a book in 2001 titled The Linguistic Genocide. When a language dies the roots of memory fades into oblivion. A repository of knowledge that was evolved through centuries dries up.

 

One, among several, of the modern crisis is our loss of languages. While this gathers multiple significances in the current time of Covid-19 even before we resorted to lockdown several thousands of languages have already disappeared from the face of the earth. Language death is not specific to modernity; languages have indeed disappeared in the past as well. But modernity’s different configurations have a unique impact on indigenous languages and linguistic diversity. Modernity comes with promises of development which begins with communication, transportation and education. It also brings visuals of development from ‘other’ sides of the world (primarily from cities in Europe and North America).

The sights of cities with skyscrapers, beautiful roads and long and snake looking overpasses, the flashing bars and salons, and most importantly, the number of Olympic medals and nuclear bombs are all tempting to materialize the ‘dreams of development’ that comes with pre-designs and conditions. Luxuries and convenience get redefined through these visuals and the comparisons they elicit. In the end, the dreams of development consist of roads, luxury cars, plush toilets, skyscrapers, smoke vomiting factories and tiled courtyards. Dreams of development put nations, societies and individuals in a race albeit by giving them promises of equality. It triggers our hormones and turns us into diehard warriors to gain access to the luxuries and promises of modernity where there is a linguistic condition.

 

For an individual or a community situated in the underdeveloped world the journey to become modern starts with language shifts. For them development is always scripted in a foreign language. Thus language shift is sine qua non to even embrace the dreams of development. This is especially true in countries like India where modernity was introduced in the 19th century under the aegis of colonialism. From the beginning its lingual frames were charted in the colonizers language that is English which further went onto become a ‘global’ language. While a global language indeed connects people across a number of cultural and national barriers, its unquestioned hegemony essentially annihilates the linguistic and environmental diversity of the very same cultures.

Even a glimpsing of the statistical accounts of dead languages will reveal that several thousands of languages have disappeared from earth during the 20th century as opposed to a few hundreds in every preceding centuries due to human migrations, invasions, cultural and physical conquests and so on and so forth. The hegemony of technology and the materially rooted forms of development, initially labeled as progress, in modernity have, from the beginning, remained a threat for linguistic and cultural pluralities. The death of languages is a strong signifier of modernity’s failure to sustain this plurality.

 

If modernity was always premised upon unachieved promises of equality and development-underdevelopment circuits that reproduce the erstwhile colonial models of hegemony its neoliberal forms are occasioning linguistic genocide in its literal forms. The switch in the meaning of language as a skill that enhances the operation of technologies and as a device of communication is final in neoliberal times. Language as a skill goes fundamentally against its conception as a system of knowledge and a corridor of memories. Memories are objectified as one embraces the dreams of development. The discourse of skills further alienates those repositories of knowledge and memories. Just as the postmodern glass covered buildings are supposed to prevent uncivilized air from entering its premises, entering the modern developed world bears conditions on one’s linguistic skills.

The problem with the term skill is, well, first of all something has to be ‘defined’ as a skill. There has to be material benefits coming out of the possession of those skills. For example, a farmer’s knowledge about soil or season, or climbing trees are not any longer looked upon as skills with any promise whatsoever, just as a language that is not used in factories, online platforms or by policymakers cannot be looked upon as a skill.

Several regional and indigenous languages thus by default are outside the domains of this linguistic skill set. According to People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) published in 2013, around 480 tribal languages and close to 200 coastal languages in India are in an endangered condition. Many of them face the threat of extinction in the near future. None of these languages figures anywhere in the official discourse nor do any form of formal education imparted in those languages. These are not part of the 22 languages that are officially scheduled and in which official documents and educational materials are prepared. These 22 languages are now available in digital platforms as part of the vernacularisation of Internet of the last decade.

A shortcut adopted under the behest of smartphone manufacturers to expand their market and/or by the state to expand its administrative reach and technological surveillance, vernacularisation of Internet and digital contents can obscure language death under a discourse of political correctness. The privilege to be digitised is available only to the 22 languages officially scheduled. The last census shows that there are over 60 languages in India that fall in the ‘spoken by more than a million category’. None of these languages are available in the digital world of communication. For the several languages outside of the list, many of which are as old as human civilizations and representing complex and ancient systems of knowledge, the journey towards total disappearance is a reality. Indian language topography has several such stories of language transitions and language deaths.

 

On May 15 this year the online publishing platform medium.com carried a short read titled, ‘The last speaker of the Andamanese Sare language has died’. Anvita Abbi, the author, hints at raupuch, a word from Sare which refers to a person who has lost his/her siblings. Unlike most mainstream languages which have terms like widow/widower or orphan, according to Anvita, this is a unique word and exists only in Sare. The brief read narrates the trees, herbs, varieties of crabs, marsh lands – significances of a rich flora and fauna – as glimpses of what Anvita came across during her close interaction with Licho, the last speaker of Sare language.¹ The eco diversity requires a language for its comprehension. Only Sare had words to articulate the specific features of that flora and fauna; just as each of our mother tongue consists of words that are deeply difficult if not impossible to be translated into English or any other language.

 

With Licho’s death Sare language and its cultural and ecological universe comes to an end. Professor Ganesh N. Devy, chairman of PLSI, had once narrated how the entire language tradition called Bo in the Andaman islands came to end with the death of a lady in 2010, who was the last speaker. He had heard from the localites that ‘she was talking to birds in her last days as no one else could understand her. Sadly, along with her, the continuous line of wisdom of 65,000 years was also gone’.² Skill has resonance only to modern institutions and it fails to account for the vast world of cultures that have thrived outside.

Sare or Bo, or even Sengmai or Tolcha – Himachal languages that existed till the last decade – or Kanashi, Darma or the several other languages left with a few thousand speakers and their numbers still shrinking, have no chances of being qualified as a ‘skill’. No factories or modern technologies use these languages. Nor are there any schools or syllabuses drafted in them. Their unfortunate speakers have to learn other languages for a sane existence. Development is not, and cannot be, crafted in their language.

All over the world language death is not an uncommon thing although it is uncommon to find newspapers or public platforms to discuss it. This is mainly because the dying languages are essentially on the outside. By default they are rendered invisible in the modern mechanisms. Their speakers either migrate to other languages or remain powerless to negotiate with ‘inside’. For the one migrated thus, the ‘skill’ in the other language can be a saviour. The other language may either be a regionally dominant vernacular, like Hindi or Telugu or Marathi, or it could be English itself. Either way language is directly translated as power and the higher education discourse of skill signifies its material component. Our schools, colleges and coaching centres are products of this discourse where this material pre-requirement can be attained. Language is just one skill although it is easy to see that it is the mother of all skills the way skill is imagined and perceived in our contemporary contexts.

 

This is the beginning of a nation’s journey to partake in the global development indexes. Skilling is a cornerstone of neoliberal imaginations of development which far exceeds its original, early modern forms. When humans are loaded with skills they can be used as machines; machines whose capacity to imagine beyond the materialistic world is heavily compromised. As a classical imagination which says that the success of a nation is in keeping its citizens equally ambitious, the term skill invokes pictures of employment and a prosperous future which any ordinary human wants to embrace.

This is the other side of the new educational policy where courses are inevitably tied to employment prospectus. The situation is such that the educationists in this country are having to listen to industrialists giving expert opinions about ‘expectations’ from courses. Education is no longer about knowledge production and dissemination; rather it is restricted, by all institutional means, to employment seeking. No employer needs a person who can speak a dying language. Neither does anyone consider centuries old knowledge systems that are dying to be anywhere useful. This is in addition to the systematic annihilation of non English Indian languages in all forms of education. Ever since the 1854 ‘Wood’s Despatch’, widely considered to be the magna carta of Indian education, mother tongue is a term that has consistently appeared in all educational policies. As the new NEP proposes mother tongue as the ‘preferred’ medium of instruction (MOI) till standard V or even VIII, it is nonetheless a replication of a more than 150 year old direction that has failed as many times.

 

On the one hand, not all vernaculars are considered ‘mother tongue’ in its formal explication citing practical reasons. The case with digitisation of vernaculars, that it is available only in a limited number of languages, is a long persisting problem in the field of education too. Thus a great bulk of Indian languages is ousted from the educational sphere by default. Thus when a tribal child goes to school, or is sent to school by the parents, with great excitement, s/he suddenly finds that the language setting of the school is different. It doesn’t make much difference to her/him if it is an English medium or a local language school; in much of the circumstances both are equally alien. The tribal child whose knowledge world is already rich with observations of nature has to begin by learning ‘A’ for ‘Apple’; both A and Apple are absent from her/his mental cosmos. In other words a great deal of incongruency is sustained between communities speaking ‘other’ languages and the education system. This is one of the reasons for the high dropout rates of children from tribal and other communities whose languages are not available for schooling. Their educational and economic backwardness, as well as the eventual disappearance of many of those languages and communities, is a continuous unspoken story in the Indian myth called development.

On the other hand, the policy of mother tongue as MOI in schools is sedentary with respect even to those mother tongues. This has to do with the overall linguistic structuring of education including higher education. Despite intense debates independent India has more or less retained the erstwhile colonial policy vis-a-vis the MOI in both schools and colleges/universities. While the norms with regard to MOI in schools is more relaxed, leaving it to the discretion of the respective states, school managements and parents, for higher education through colleges and universities, English remains the sole MOI. All subjects except language papers are taught and their examinations undertaken, with rare exceptions, in English language. The question worth asking is why should a student or her/his parents chose a non-English language medium school which is not helpful for them in any sense to prepare for higher education? While the possibilities of mother tongue learning are immense and undisputed, such possibilities are fully annulled later during its stage of blossoming. The reverse impact of MOI in higher education on the MOI in school is least studied.

 

In a recent presentation on changing food practices among a tribal community in Kerala, the presenter lamented that the tribes who used to consume close to 64 leafy vegetables in the past are now left with only four, which they have to buy from the market. The daily food basket that has sustained the tribe for several centuries has withered to an extreme state that malnutrition is a daily story than an exception. The members of the tribal community do not remember the names of items that once constituted their staple food. They were unable to preserve their cultural-linguistic systems due to the different types of encroachment, both physical as well as cultural. Their language is dying just as their ecosystem have long eroded to make way for various development programmes including roads that connect the two states amidst which the hamlet is situated.

Their choiceless youngsters are busy learning modern skills for survival. Their eventual failure sends them back to their original habitats only to find yet another episode of poverty, the miserable youth finding relief in drugs and newborn babies and their mothers suffering from (many die) malnutrition. If they remain successful, which is very rare and exceptional than a common event, it becomes news headlines (so and so person from so and so tribal community qualifies in civil service exams, for instance!). Their failures are all common topics in boring social science projects (‘High Level Drug Consumption among’ or ‘High Infant Mortality among …community: A Socioeconomic Study’, for examples). Death of language is at the heart of the tribal disillusionment; this contradicts the popular narrative of development and skilling where linguistic plurality is deemed a hazard.

 

The socioeconomy of skills is a slayer of linguistic diversity. The arrogant modern world has nothing to learn from ‘other’ knowledge systems. The 64 leafy vegetables are lost just as the eco-knowledge system that sustained them. The state will spend billions to implement a giant commercial project to make KFC chicken outlets available in the rural areas and call it development. The tribal youth who are denied their 64 leafy vegetables will be put to work in those outlets for meager incomes.

 

The skill India programmes conducted directly under the ministry will provide them with skills to work in those outlets. In fact, the long directory available at the official website of the skill India is replete with skills required for canonic industrial occupations. These are specifically meant for students and job seekers from lower class backgrounds and other marginalized segments in our society who cannot afford to study in mainstream universities or engineering colleges or join for management courses. This doesn’t in anyway mean that the latter institutions are exempted from the discourse of skills. Institutions of higher learning in general are squarely connected with industry through neoliberal policies and strategies. I shall look at these dynamic interconnections in a while.

The different levels of skill sets operate to produce a catastrophic impact on the cultural and linguistic diversity. We are more interested in Foreign Direct Investments and development models that drain our resources and pollute the air, than knowledge based form of development that will allow the indigenous knowledge systems to flourish sustaining parallel ecosystems and cultural cosmoses. The neoliberal discourse of skills outcast all traditional and indigenous cultural properties including languages.

Skill also gains meaning as a component that is achieved and not hereditary. When language is (re) defined as a skill, in countries like India where English is a foreign language, it is a hard earned commodity which students achieve through their parents’ investment. Here the threat of language death spreads to even the dominant vernaculars. The concern about linguistic skill of a child starts from its early socialization. Parents are keen to bring in books, cartoons and other animation videos that are made in English language. Schools, coaching centres, spoken English classes – on smart phones or real – are chosen meticulously with the explicit intention of helping the child build its language skills. Language skills here refer to English language skills. In the given scenario of globalization, corporatization, job markets and so on, this looks inevitable. However the anglicisation far exceeds the ‘normal’ limits and there is a ‘naturalisation’ of English that is constantly undertaken in the Indian middle class families.

 

While learning a foreign language is expected to make one essentially multilingual, in the Indian context it is a catalyst for monolinguism. The naturalisation of English is achieved by converting the domestic language inside households from local vernaculars to English. Among several families in Indian cities this shift from the parents’ vernacular to English is nearly complete. In universities professors share the experience of finding the number of students with a fairly good understanding or a serious interest in Indian languages as drastically declining. Language transition is becoming more inevitable than fashionable in the Indian higher education system. Last time I spoke to a colleague she shared her disillusionment on having counted less than 20 students responding positively to the question ‘how many of you can confidently read or write in your mother tongue?’ The total number of students in the class exceeded 90.

Before Covid-19 struck our social lives I happened to visit an old classmate of mine who now lives in Bangalore. From a middle class family in a village in Thrissur, a moderate township district in Kerala, he shifted to Bangalore after his postgraduation in the same government aided college where we graduated. Later he married from Bangalore and settled there. As we shared our memories from college and stories of friends I found out that his only child, now in her first year undergrad, could not read or write either Kannada or Malayalam, her mother’s and father’s languages respectively. I found her very uncomfortable in Malayalam while she managed to converse in Kannada. This was very surprising as I kept listening to my friend excited to share our old memories and reproduce the old banter in Malayalam. Such instances are more common than elision. They occur not just in cities but also in suburban and even nonurban parts where language is first defined as a means of communication and then as a tool for success in competitions. (Let us not forget that the phrase ‘English is the passport to success’ is by far the most popular mantra in our circles!)

 

This goes alongside the emerging trend in several universities in India where language departments are fast becoming foreign language departments. While this still remains to be studied elaborately the number of Indian languages taught in these departments is dwindling day by day. This remains the case whereas European and other dominant languages like French, German and Chinese find entries into these departments.

Their currency qualifies them as skills whereas the position of all other Indian languages is increasingly renegotiated. Even the dominant Indian languages have to bank on their demographic strength which again is dwindling as more people are in a linguistic transience and students are increasingly unwilling to opt for them. However, while public institutions of learning are still somewhat obligatory, private institutions are more profligate and unhesitatingly chuck local languages one by one. Further, to satiate the ambitious parents and students and to remove their ‘inherent’ difficulties to learn a different language, optional English papers are offered that are used as replacements for other language papers.

Modern universities are places where ‘skills’ are taught to prepare the youngsters to take on corporate jobs. This signifies the shift in the meaning of a university from a place of producing knowledge to a place of producing labour force with specific skills. Industrial connects flourish in sites of higher learning and universities are expected to (in fact obliged to, according to the recent policy shifts) provide placement opportunities for all its students. The neoliberal shifts in educational policies not only put universities squarely in connection with industries and corporates, but also go a long way in designing courses that match their interests and requirements. Frames of knowledge production, interrogating or subverting the system whenever there is a necessity are castaways from such models.

In the neoliberal age the corporate-led developmental agendas are part and parcel of the mass psyches, cutting across the class barriers, where the discourse of skills, vernacularised internet, mother tongue education and so on are part of everyday rhetorics. When the parents’ ambitious nevertheless desperate and miragy visions of a secured and prosperous future of their children are crafted in the corporate boardrooms, sustaining cultural-linguistic-ecological pluralities does not seem to be a legitimate concern. Language looked upon as a skill combines the parental aspirations and the market expectations. Its naturalisation in the emerging domestic spheres, as well as in education and digital technologies, reflect how deeply language ideologies operate in our psyches.

 

Footnotes:

1. https://medium.com/@survivalinterna-tional/the-last-speaker-of-the-sare-language-has-died-767013159e83

2. https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/vIbx7ZUHxvTQMbwboNYHPI/India-is-becoming-a-graveyard-of-languages.html