Tinsukia, Jun 26 : About a year ago, an Australian foundation startled linguists by revealing that somewhere in the world one language dies about every two weeks.
A fervent research began to unearth the dying dialects and three of the most endangered languages were found in Assam’s backyard.
Tangsa and Singpho and Tai are now spoken by less than 40 people in Tinsukia’s Margherita subdivision.Even if the scripts survive, the songs and poetry will be extinct in less than a decade, linguists feel.
To save these language communities from extinction, a German foundation has come forward to provide the essential logistics to record the grammar, poetry and songs for posterity.
The Volkswagen Stiftung Foundation will also help in documenting Tai traditional manuscripts.
“There are fewer than 40 individuals across the three communities who have the knowledge of the traditional culture, language and poetics to be able compose and sing traditional songs/poetry. In these societies, no clear distinction can be drawn between song and poetry,” said Palash Nath of the department of linguistics, Gauhati University, who is part of the project.
According to linguists, nearly half the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today are likely to disappear in the next 100 years.
“The rate of language extinction far exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants,” said David Harrison, professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.
Work on the three language groups has already begun.
“We have visited a number of villages inhabited by members of these communities. We have spent a lot of time there and have interacted with villagers, both old and young, enquiring about their old songs. We have also recorded a number of such songs sung by people who the community thinks can sing them,” Nath said.
The scholar has also found ways to preserve some old traditional instruments.
“We look for people within the community who can make such instruments and request them keep the tradition alive,” he said.
Stephen Morey of the Research Center for Linguistic Typology, Australia, who is the principal investigator in the project, said the aim was to record as much of these languages as one can and then archiving those recordings, which will also be available for members of those communities. All these recordings will be sent to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Neimegen in the Netherlands for digital archiving.
“The fact that scholars are taking an interest in the languages may encourage speakers to make more efforts to preserve their script,” Morey said.
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