PEOPLE PHOTO-FEATURE BODY BASICS WIDE ANGLE Vikram Sampath, biographer Three rarely photographed The drag flick raises hopes Being poor and sick in Delhi’s and historian at age 32 tribes of Kutch for Indian hockey government hospitals MARCH 10 2012 Brahmins in the task of drafting a White Paper on the lan- Mattur village in Karnataka guage situation in each state, which details (right), where the status of each speech community and tells Sanskrit is whether and to what extent a language is supposedly endangered — a little more than a day’s work spoken; in a country with over 6,000 written mother- (below) tongues. Ironically, in a country with such lin- Kachim, one guistic diversity, the last time this exercise of the few was undertaken was during the Raj, in the hundred Linguistic Survey of India (1894-1928). speakers of The trigger is UNESCO’s 2009 report. It Koro. A 2008 created a stir in the media and in Parliament, expedition by though soon after its publication, members National Geographic’s of a few language groups the atlas had pro- Enduring nounced extinct disputed the findings. Aimol, Voices Project for instance, was listed as an extinct language, began but incensed members of the community said documenting there were at least 6,000 speakers in Manipur! Koro, which The atlas was corrected. was This is not the only anomaly. Sastry, who previously can speak seven languages, introduces one of unknown to his assistants, Loveson Taraon of Khuringmul linguists village in Manipur, and asks him to speak in his mother tongue, Taraon. He obliges. Taraon is a language classified by Unesco as critical- ly endangered, meaning “the youngest speak- ers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently”. But Taraon, who is in his 20s, is no grandparent, nor does he speak his language infrequently. It is the same with petite Neiboi Bapui Purum, another staff member at Sastry’s institute, whose mother-tongue, Purum, is also sup- posed to be endangered. She faces light-heart- ed ribbing about her “endangered” status. Sastry’s team collects data, transcribes recordings and works to preserve endangered languages by developing a script and prepar- ing picture glossaries and dictionaries. Since SAGGERE RADHAKRISHNA the launch of the project, the team has covered over 100 speech communities in the North- east, and is working in Orissa and Jammu & Kashmir. The original deadline of 2010 has passed but Sastry is confident the exercise will be over in 2012-13. Even his impending retire- ment in August does not perturb him. “My n the hills of Arunachal Pradesh lives job is to keep the language alive, not just record an isolated tribe that speaks a language it... If a language is lost, it is an intangible her- that was hidden from the world till just itage that is lost forever,” he says. about five years ago. Linguists stumbled The Enduring Voices Project is trying to upon Koro while researching two other document and revitalise struggling languages Ilittle-known languages, Aka and Miji, in vil- Mind your with a new tool: talking dictionaries. “For these lages accessible only by climbing steep hills dictionaries, we record thousands of words and crossing streams in bamboo boats. Koro and create a first-ever Internet presence for a has only 800-1,000 speakers, most of whom are small language that allows it to expand its voice older than 20 — a clear sign that the language and reach a global audience,” says Harrison. is not being passed on to the young. It has no The project is looking at Ho, a tribal language script. Koro has every factor it takes to become of India with about 1 million speakers but extinct, perhaps in a generation or two. under pressure from more popular languages. In the Andaman Islands, the population of LANGUAGES the Great Andamanese is up from 43 in 2005 to over 50, but the number of people who can According to UNESCO, 198 of India’s mother tongues are in danger. Veenu Sandhu speak the language has shrunk to five. All the Ultimately, the effort to preserve a language rest speak Hindi. The old language, which is and Indulekha Aravind on what we may lose and what is being done about it has to come from its speakers. In picturesque really four languages (Jeru, Khora, Bo and Mattur village in the Shimoga district, 300 km Sare), has no future. The last speaker of Khora, small tribes and their languages. “Many lan- munication. This is particularly true of lan- professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru from Bangalore, an attempt to preserve lin- Boro Sr, died recently. And before her died guages of India still await documentation. No guages that do not have a script or literature. In University, New Delhi, who has written the guistic heritage is slowly losing steam. Mattur, the last speaker of Bo, Boa Sr. Khora and Bo are one knows exactly how many,” says K David the absence of books, theatre and cinema, there Dictionary of the Great Andamanese Language, on the banks of the Tunga, has a large com- now extinct. Harrison, a National Geographic Society fellow is nothing to gain from learning the original says it contains words which have no equal in munity of Sanketi Brahmins. It was hailed in In Kashmir, written on the walls in remote and director of research at the Living Tongues language. This has pushed many a language Hindi or English but give perfect insight into the media as a Sanskrit village, where most villages or on old Muslim graves, along with Institute for Endangered Languages in the into disuse. the life of the island-dwellers. Like theca, which people not only know Sanskrit but use it in dai- epitaphs in Persian, is a script which just about USA. It was a team of National Geographic’s For tribes, there is “prestige” associated means “one who is intoxicated after drinking ly conversation. 10 people in India can read today and fewer Enduring Voices Project (which documents with “other” languages like English and Hindi honey”. There is a good reason this word exists. The effort to revive Sanskrit dates to 1981, still can write. Sharda came into being around endangered languages) that discovered Koro. that promise economic mobility. There is also “A Great Andamanese can drink up to 1 kg of when Mattur’s villagers greeted a Vishweshra the 8th century and was much in use in peer pressure to adopt the language of the honey in one go,” explains Abbi. Similarly, Teertha swami of Udupi Pejawar Mutt by Kashmir till the first quarter of the 20th cen- larger, surrounding community and the polit- there is a word for “one who chews” or “one organising an entire programme in Sanskrit. tury. Today, it is almost gone. ical advantages of aligning with a larger group. who returns after hunting” or “one who roams The swami said he would give Mattur the title The picture is grim — the predictions more The phenomenon at work here is what sociol- Some experts think that “mixed” or inter-lin- around.” But these words and the worldview of “Sanskrit village” if they would work to pro- so. UNESCO’s Atlas of World’s Languages in ogist Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916- gual marriages are also a factor, where the they represent are disappearing. Hindi is what mote the language, which they did, says M B Danger (2009) listed India as the country with 99) called Sanskritisation: the effort by com- husband’s mother-tongue is different from the Great Andamanese speak. Children go to Srinidhi, secretary of the local chapter of the the largest number of languages in danger, at munities, tribes included, to follow the his wife’s and they live in a third state, result- the Vivekananda School. Their parents, too, Delhi-based Samskruta Bharati. Walking along 196. It later revised it to 198. One of the customs and practices of those above them in ing in their child usually speaking the lan- cannot recall the last time they themselves the narrow lanes of the agraharam (the “hotspots” where local languages are at high the caste hierarchy. This helps communities to guage of the third state or Hindi/English. spoke in Great Andamanese. Brahmin part of the village) it is easy to imag- risk is Arunachal Pradesh. Linguists consider it move up the social ladder. One manifestation Behind the dwindling numbers are stories The few Kashmiri Pundits who can read ine that Sanskrit is spoken here. In reality it is a “black hole” due to little data on scores of is the adoption of Hindi as the means of com- of loss of identity and worldview. Anvita Abbi, and write Sharda are hopeful that the younger Sanketi, a mix of five languages, and Kannada CHRIS RAINIER © 2012 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC generation will turn its attention to this that are used in conversation. ancient script, traces of which were also found T N Gireesh, the 40-year-old headmaster of VANISHING VOICES in the archaeological remains of some idols in the Sharada Vilas High School and Samskrut Language Area Number of speakers Afghanistan. V N Drabu, a Delhi-based schol- Pathshala, says children’s interest in Sanskrit Great Andamanese Andaman Islands 5 ar and retired history professor, is past 80. He is waning. “They are not as curious and enthu- Jarawa Andaman Islands31 can read Sharda, and learnt it when he was 65. siastic as they used to be,” he says, adding that Onge Andaman Islands50 “Till 70 years ago, Pundits would write horo- people seem to have grown inured to Sanskrit Sentinelese Andaman Islands 50 scopes in Sharda.