10-Jan-2020: Nepal’s Seke ‘near-extinct’

The “near-extinct” Nepalese language Seke has just 700 speakers around the world. Of these, 100 are in New York, and roughly half of these 100 stay in one building in the city. Most of the Seke-speaking community in New York stays in the Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn, or in Queens.

The last year, 2019, was the International Year of Indigenous Languages, mandated by the United Nations (UN). In December 2019 President of the UN General Assembly Tijjani Muhammad-Bande said that, despite efforts throughout the year, one indigenous language disappears every fortnight.

According to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), Seke is one of the over 100 indigenous languages of Nepal and is mainly spoken in the five villages of Chuksang, Chaile, Gyakar, Tangbe and Tetang in the Upper Mustang district. The dialects from these villages differ substantially and are believed to have varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

In recent years, Seke has been retreating in the face of Nepali, which is Nepal’s official language and is considered to be crucial for getting educational and employment opportunities outside villages.

According to ELA, difficult conditions at home and job prospects elsewhere have brought speakers of Seke to places such as Pokhara, Kathmandu and even New York. Therefore, the vulnerability of the language is linked to the migration of people to places where Seke is not spoken, which has reduced the intergenerational transmission of the language. Furthermore, the younger generation does not find much use in learning the language, giving preference to Nepali and English.

UNESCO has six degrees of endangerment;

1. Safe, which are the languages spoken by all generations and their intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted;
2. Vulnerable languages, which are spoken by most children but may be restricted to certain domains;
3. Definitely endangered languages, which are no longer being learnt by children as their mother tongue.
4. Severely endangered are languages spoken by grandparents and older generations, and while the parent generation may understand it, they may not speak it with the children or among themselves.
5. Critically endangered languages are those of which the youngest speakers are the grandparents or older family members who may speak the language partially or infrequently.
6. Extinct languages, of which no speakers are left.

Considering these definitions, Seke may be considered to be a definitely endangered language. As per UNESCO, roughly 57 per cent of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages are safe, about 10 per cent are vulnerable, 10.7 per cent are definitely endangered, about 9 per cent are severely endangered, 9.6 per cent are critically endangered and about 3.8 per cent of all languages are extinct since 1950.

As per the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), there are roughly 201 endangered languages in India and about 70 in Nepal.

6-Apr-2018: Walmiki and Malhar; two endangered languages find their voice

A linguist from the University of Hyderabad has stumbled on two languages called Walmiki and Malhar both predominantly in the remote regions of Odisha.

The languages are categorised `endangered’ as the number of people speaking is small. For instance Malhar is spoken by just 75 including children from a particular community. These people live in a remote and isolated hamlet about 165 kms from Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha.

Endangered languages: The discovery has been made and announced by Panchanan Mohanty of the Centre for Endangered Languages and Mother Tongue Studies at the UoH. He has collected data, did preliminary analysis and published a paper in the proceedings of the XX Annual Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, UK.

Walmiki is spoken in the district of Koraput and in the bordering districts of Andhra Pradesh. The etymology of the name is also interesting. It indicates that the community speaking the language have descent from the Indian saint-poet Valmiki, who is credited to have written one version of the epic Ramayana.

The Union Government has been making efforts to document the endangered tribal and minor languages. There are several languages unknown to the world and waiting to be discovered and documented. India is also considered a linguists Paradise and termed a sociolinguistic giant.

Though less than 100 speak the language Malhar, they are very fluent as they live completely detached from the Odia speaking neighbours. They survive on daily labour and collections from the nearby forest. Analysis indicated that the tongue belongs to the North Dravidian subgroup of the Dravidian family of languages.

Malhar has close affinities with other North Dravidian languages like Malto and Kurux spoken in Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal.

18-Feb-2018: 42 Indian languages are endangered

As per the Census Directorate, 42 Indian languages are said to be endangered. Due to the small number who speak the languages are expected to soon be extinct. The languages include dialects as well. The 42 languages are considered endangered because they are spoken by less than 10,000 people.

The endangered languages include:

A central scheme is in place to protect these languages. The Central Institute of Indian Languages has been working on the conservation of these languages. Under the programme, grammatical descriptions, monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, language primers, anthologies of folklore, encyclopedias of all languages or dialects that are endangered are being prepared. There are currently 31 languages in India that have been given the status of official languages by state governments and union territories.