[ Keyom Doni ]
All over the world, thousands of languages, especially indigenous languages, are on the verge of extinction, and in Arunachal, we are witnessing this phenomenon. One can find that in our state, many adults and children have mastery in English and Hindi, yet they fail to communicate in their own mother tongues.
To understand this phenomenon, let’s make certain observations. Have you ever witnessed that interview board members allowed indigenous languages as the medium of the interview, or that in any beauty pageant or school admission interview, the committee used indigenous languages as the core language of scoring? Unfortunately, only those candidates will have the leverage to score more if they fluently speak English. Moreover, in the villages, the younger generation can’t communicate in their own mother tongues; thus, to adjust, the older people exchange them with Arunachal Hindi. Such practices significantly contribute to the extinction of the indigenous languages.
History has witnessed that only those languages have survived that have some monetary value. An example is our Arunachali Hindi. To do business or communicate in Arunachal, one has to speak in Arunachali Hindi. This is the reason why we have to transform our languages into monetary form, which means that if we speak our languages, we should get rewards or leverage in the form of jobs, communications, etc.
The transformation of indigenous languages in the form of monetary value can be understood in the following ways:
- Include indigenous languages as third language in the state recruitment process, opening the window of opting for indigenous language during viva voce.
- Make a compulsory third language in every school, both private and government.
- Establish a translation and research department.
- Develop and use AI tools for preserving local languages, phonetics, grammar, etc.
- Dub movies and cartoons in local languages.
- Pass a bill in the legislative assembly to draw up an event where everyone who resides in Arunachal will speak only indigenous languages for a day and treat it as a festival.
- Encourage and provide assistance to the people and the communities to establish community radios and podcast channels.
If we are not taking any significant steps to practice, preserve, and propagate our languages, then no one will, as in the entire world we are the only ones who practice and propagate our indigenous languages. If we discontinue speaking our languages, then our languages will forever vanish from this universe.
Therefore, it is the responsibility of our government to take steps to preserve, practice, and propagate our indigenous languages, and the community is equally responsible for doing the same. In fact, the role of the communities is much bigger than that of the government, as the community knows where the problems lie and how to resolve them, or at least make necessary reforms to keep our mother tongues alive.
And see the irony of this article: while advocating preservation of indigenous languages, as an indigenous person, I have to write it in English. (The contributor can be reached at keyomdoni123@gmail.com)
