Languages: Ups and Downs

Words. We say a lot of them everyday, some good, some bad, some congratulatory, some accusatory and so on - you get the gist. There are approximately 6000 languages in the world, some are more common than others, a couple have been around longer than the continents, and some are newer than your phone. What intrigued me above all, were the languages that are not recognised or spoken any longer. If I ask you to name a "dead language", Latin will perhaps come to mind first, it did for me too! But human kind has had a long and varied history of creating language out of emotion, words out of pictures and stories out of shards of memories passed down through generations. So why is it, that languages we have so carefully crafted are running to ruin?

I believe the answer lies in examining how far we've come as a race and how the relationships that defined our day to day lives in the past have changed today. If I may start off by painting a little picture,

It is a hot summer's day in the ancient world, the sun is slowly inching its way down, refusing to clear the way for the cool of the moonlight. As the twilight dusk descends, you sit outside, letting the small yet calming breeze caress your soil encrusted hair. The fields tended to and the food made, the time to share the joys of living in a small village is now. The sand under your feet is still warm from the sun, and the gentle conversation and buzz of the awakening fireflies lulls you into a sense of comfort. Amusing anecdotes help you take your mind of the day's work and words of wisdom and bravery passed down from ancestors buoy with hope after a tough summer of drought. Energised and hopeful, your mind is at rest for the day.

So, the effect? How did the passage make you feel? One would hope it conveyed a sense of safety, comfort and community. This then, encapsulates what human kind has always been pursuing - a sense of belonging achieved by a shared trait, most commonly language.

Languages are created and forgotten everyday. As necessity breeds invention, a connection breeds a language. "Inside jokes", "slang", "idioms" are a few unconventional examples of a language connection shared by a group of people. These evolve and grow similar to all languages.

What then, would cause a language to be forgotten? My view is that a language "dies" so to speak, when the last native speaker utters the last word of it. Scripts lost, stories badly translated, ancestors forgotten and more importantly a broken connection all lead to the decline of a language. Words that once used to be uttered along riverbanks, in places of worship or read aloud with pride are now forgotten and foreign to even those who descended from the speakers.

Relations that were once forged daily sitting around fires under the night sky are now limited to sporadic contact via technology or the occasional face-to-face meeting. With the changes in the way we communicate, come changes in the language of communications themselves. Of course, the advance of technology has helped bridge the distance between people from all over the world but what it also has achieved is the the isolation of languages that aren't already bolstered by every day speech.

So I guess a solution to prevent this solitude of language is to keep speaking. Speaking up against tyranny, speaking out against injustice and most importantly speaking to maintain and nourish a connection. Learn an "endangered language", try and see if you can learn and communicate with friends in their home language and vice versa. Above all, don't forget to use your words to share your stories and strengthen connections with those around you.

Prashamsa