Language Endangerment — Reading

Passage

A Roughly seven thousand languages are currently spoken, and linguists commonly estimate that between a third and a half will have no fluent speakers by the end of this century. The figure sounds precise and is not. Counting languages requires deciding where a dialect ends and a language begins, a judgement that is frequently political rather than linguistic — the usual observation is that a language is a dialect with an army. What is not seriously disputed is the direction, or that the rate exceeds anything in the recorded past. B Distribution explains why the arithmetic is so lopsided. About four per cent of languages are spoken by ninety-six per cent of people. Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi each have hundreds of millions of speakers; the median language has fewer than ten thousand. Papua New Guinea alone accounts for over eight hundred, many with a few thousand speakers each. A small number of very large languages and a very large number of small ones is the actual shape of the situation. C Languages rarely disappear because speakers are unaware of the loss. They disappear because parents make individually reasonable decisions. Where schooling, employment and administration operate in a dominant language, raising a child in a minority one imposes a real cost on that child, and the sequence is well documented: bilingualism in one generation, comprehension without production in the next, and nothing in the third. The break happens in the home rather than in policy documents. D Coercion has often accelerated this. Residential schools in Canada, Australia and the United States removed children from families and punished them for speaking their languages, with effects that persist. But attributing all loss to suppression misreads many cases. Languages have also been abandoned voluntarily by speakers who judged, correctly, that fluency in a larger language would improve their children's prospects — a choice that is neither irrational nor free. E What is lost is contested. The strong claim, that language determines thought, has not survived testing. Weaker versions have: speakers of languages using compass directions rather than left and right show markedly better spatial orientation, and colour vocabulary produces small measurable differences in discrimination. The firmer loss is documentary. Small languages frequently encode detailed knowledge of local ecology, medicine and navigation that exists nowhere else, and grammatical structures that constrain what linguists can claim about human language in general. F Revitalisation has a real success case and it is instructive. Hebrew was revived as a everyday spoken language after centuries of liturgical use only, but the conditions were exceptional: a state, compulsory schooling, mass immigration without a shared alternative, and powerful ideological commitment. Where these are absent, results are more modest. Welsh and Māori have stabilised through broadcasting, immersion schooling and official status; many other programmes produce learners who can perform a language without using it domestically. G The uncomfortable conclusion is that documentation and revitalisation are different projects. Recording a language thoroughly enough for future study is achievable, increasingly cheap and largely a matter of will. Keeping it in daily use requires that speaking it not disadvantage its speakers, which is an economic and political question rather than a linguistic one. Confusing the two allows a great deal of well-funded activity that preserves records while the last conversations end. H Revitalisation efforts that have achieved genuine, durable success share a feature that documentation projects generally do not: they create new speakers, not merely records of old ones. The best-known example is Modern Hebrew, revived from a language with no native speakers for roughly two thousand years into the first language of millions, though the scale of political and institutional investment behind that case — a new state organised substantially around the project — has no obvious parallel available to most endangered languages today. More modest but still instructive successes include Māori in New Zealand and Hawaiian in the United States, both revived through immersion schooling that raises children as native speakers from infancy rather than teaching the language as a subject to adults, on the theory, well supported by research into language acquisition, that a language survives only where children acquire it as a first language in ordinary daily use, not where it is taught, however well-resourced the teaching. Immersion schooling is expensive, requires trained teachers who are themselves fluent, and takes at least a generation to show results, which makes it a far harder sell to funders than a documentation archive that produces a tangible, fundable, comparatively quick deliverable. The languages most likely to survive are not necessarily the best documented ones; they are the ones some community has managed to keep transmitting to children.

বাংলা অনুবাদ জমা দেওয়ার পর দেখা যাবে — আগে ইংরেজিতে বোঝার চেষ্টা করুন।