North East India home to at least 200 languages, says NEILAC head

DIMAPUR — The Department of Linguistics in collaboration with the Research and Development Cell of Tetso College, Chümoukedima, organised a talk on ‘Language endangerment in the Northeast: From despair to hope,’ on March 30.

The college in an update informed that Rev. Dr. Vijay A D’Souza, director of the North Eastern Institute of Language and Culture (NEILAC), Guwahati, was the speaker of the talk programme.

In his lecture, Dr. D’Souza informed that about 80% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are spoken by about 20% of the world’s population. D’Souza said the North East region of India alone is home to at least 200 languages. He stated that most of the languages have less than 10,000 speakers each and are considered to be at the stage of  ‘endangered’ or ‘moribund’ as per the UNESCO’s 2003 Vitality Index.

He drew the historical and contemporary reasons for the endangerment of those languages and also pointed out the cultural loss and the mental and physical harm caused to the people of those communities through language endangerment.

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 “The attitude of the colonial masters who considered those languages as worthless and uncivilised have been carried down through generations till today, making people shun their own languages in pursuit of English and Hindi, on the assumption that it is those dominant languages that will grant social mobility and employment opportunities rather than their mother tongues,” he said.

Besides, he stated that such attitudes are complemented by wrong assumptions that children get confused if they learn more than one language at a young age.

Dwelling on his experience of working with the Hrusso-Aka community in Arunachal Pradesh to revitalise their language, D’Souza demonstrated the importance of mobilising the community in order to preserve, document and revitalise their own language.

In reply to questions on how to revitalise one’s own language, he said the best and easiest way is to speak one’s own language whenever possible and to cultivate an attitude of pride and belongingness for one’s own language and community.

Dr. D’Souza is also an associate member of the faculty of Linguistics at University of Oxford as well as the academic and research guide of the Aka (Hrusso) Language Academy, Arunachal Pradesh.