The Fight To Preserve Endangered Languages In India

Deepa Pawar, 37, grew up in a tent in a basti in Mumbai. She and her friends— all belonging to the Ghisadi tribe—studied in a government school, but were discouraged from conversing among themselves in their community language—Ghisadi Arsi Parsi. These memories stayed with her while growing up.

Pawar—now an activist—fears that her generation may be the last to speak the language or even know that it exists. This encouraged her to initiate the process of preserving the language by coming up with a creative dictionary and documenting phrases and words. As part of her advocacy, she also wants to initiate a dialogue about why community languages are important and the need to preserve them.

Many communities like the Ghisadis—which fall under the larger umbrella of Nomadic Tribes and Denotified Tribes (NT-DNT)—are struggling to protect their languages because most of them end up concealing their identities.

The NT-DNT community is carrying a centuries-old stigma. In 1871, the British India government brought in the Criminal Tribes Act which described certain communities (mostly nomadic) as criminal by birth. After independence, the Indian government replaced this Act with the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952. However, even today, those belonging to these communities are often subjected to stigmatisation and many are found to be living on the fringes of society.

People from these communities are miles away from basic rights like education, healthcare and a permanent address, and are stripped of their fundamental rights to justice, equality and freedom. All these factors force them to hide their identities and, as a consequence, their languages.

“Languages are the pride and strength of marginalised communities and attempts by anyone to kill or suppress any language must be prevented because that amounts to muzzling the voice of a community and a direct attack on its identity,” says Pawar.

She founded the Anubhuti Trust, which works closely with the NT-DNT communities, as well as women and youths belonging to Dalit, Adivasi and rural communities in Maharashtra. Her work is centered on reclaiming the dignity that rightfully belongs to every community by the virtue of being human. But the project that is close to her heart is the documentation of her community language.

She is not alone. Many from the NT-DNT community, especially women, are now involved in preserving their languages—the need of the hour. The 1961 census records India as having 1,652 languages. By 1971, the number stood at 808. In the past 50 years, over 220 Indian languages have been lost, with 197 others categorised as endangered, according to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), 2013. The survey was launched in 2010 in order to update existing knowledge about the languages spoken in the country. The aim, among other things, was to address the need to look at the languages of indigenous people, minority communities, and the marginalised and bring them to the centre of compelling language debates in the contemporary world.

One of the reasons behind languages becoming extinct is that the government currently defines a language as one that is marked by a script. Also, it does not recognise any language with less than 10,000 speakers. As a result of this, more unscripted languages are now facing the danger of extinction. Most of these languages are spoken by marginalised communities.

In 2014, the National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (NCDNT) was set up. However, these communities continue to face considerable challenges, including the struggle of preserving and documenting their languages.

“Language extinction also signifies exploitation and dominance because it indicates that one has had to give importance to a language other than their own, to be more acceptable and palatable to the other,” says Pawar.

“It also indicates that we are modifying ourselves to fit into an outside ideal. Not having our nomadic mother tongues in school is a huge challenge to accord them the necessary respect and honour,” says Pawar, a recipient of several awards.

The organisation that is supporting her with her efforts to get her language documented is Wikitongues. It is a non-profit based in New York, which runs language revitalisation programmes. They provide a grant of $2,000 per year to people and communities working on revitalising languages.

Wikitongues safeguards endangered languages and supports the leaders of mother tongue projects. “We produce free resources for people who want to document or revitalise their languages. We also help people archive linguistic documentation for free and maintain a fellowship for activists to start language revitalisation projects in their communities,” says Daniel Bögre Udell, a language activist and the co-founder of Wikitongues, also a Ted Speaker.

As a teenager living in Spain, Udell observed that Catalan—a language widely spoken between 1137 and 1749 as the official language of Aragon, an autonomous community in the country—was a successfully revitalised language. This made him think of his ancestral language Yiddish, which is not known well by people of his generation. He felt that as an Ashkenazi Jew, it was important to revitalise Yiddish. This motivated him to build Wikitongues.

Referring to various studies, Udell states that being multilingual improves the neurological pathways of the brain, which helps a person to have better memory and retention power. Not knowing one’s language impacts a person’s self-esteem. By not knowing the mother tongue, people or communities may lose out on significant aspects of culture and history.

Another language that received the Wikitongues grant in 2022 was the Raji language. The revitalisation effort was undertaken by Tulsi Rajbaar, 30, who lives in Chakarpur, Uttarakhand. Rajbaar belongs to the Raji community, a nomadic tribe, which is settled across the Kumaon belt.

The name Raji is short for Van-Raji, loosely translated as ‘royal forest people’ who have a lot of knowledge about medicinal plants. Losing this language would also mean losing the knowledge related to those medicinal plants, which is embedded in the language. The information about medicinal plants is by default written in Raji and is important from the point of view of conserving ecology and biodiversity.

In a bid to preserve Raji, Rajbaar took the initiative to conduct workshops for children to familiarise them with the language and help them master it. “It’s all the more important now to preserve the language as not many people know about it and also because it is a part of our parampara (tradition),” she says.

Rajbaar’s efforts are supported by Kavita Rastogi, who was the head of the linguistic department of Lucknow University. She is the founder of the Society for Endangered and Lesser Known Languages. It was launched in 2011 with the aim of revitalising endangered languages by bringing like-minded people together to document such languages, describe their grammar, and prepare dictionaries and pedagogical material for the native communities.

Rastogi has been working for 25 years with the Raji community on language revitalisation. She believes that once we stop using a language, the knowledge about traditional art and practices associated with the community is also lost.

She gives an example of how her mother made pakoras from a leaf called gehua in the monsoons. She feels that this particular knowledge hasn’t been transferred to her children as they have moved out. Therefore, the revitalisation workshops also focus on motivating and encouraging people to use the language frequently.

Rastogi has helped Rajbaar raise awareness about the Raji language at the national level. They encourage children to make videos about medicinal plants. They have developed a book which has community stories and have distributed them to people in the community. They are also working on a similar book for poems. Rastogi also helped develop a trilingual audio-visual dictionary and an alphabet reader of Raji.

She explains how Bhojpuri parents encourage their children to speak in English at home, so that they can confidently converse in English outside. “Learning other languages isn’t a problem but forgetting one’s own is. A lot of research has shown that teaching a child to speak in his or her mother tongue helps them learn other languages better,” she added.

Most schools, including the ones like the Raji Tribal Residential School in Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand, managed with the help of the Tribal Department, discourage children from speaking in Raji in school. As a result of this, children are not able to have a proper grip on either of the languages—English, which is taught to them and is a new language for them, and their mother tongue, which they gradually forget.

“We as a society, evaluate people on the basis of their attire and also the ability to speak English well. It’s good to appreciate a person for speaking English fluently but the problem arises when a non-English speaker is looked down upon,” she says. She feels that people need to be aware that speaking one’s mother tongue does not lower their social status.

While there is an urgent need to preserve these languages, the situation is not entirely hopeless. As Udell says: “There are not many critically endangered languages in India, but there are a lot of threatened languages that might become critically endangered, if nothing changes in the next 40-50 years. We’re not there yet, so there’s a lot of time to turn the ship around in India.”

Priyamvada Mangal is a Mumbai-based journalist

(This appeared in the print as 'Saving Languages')