Language death: Who is mourning??

How do languages die?

How CAN a language die?

Is language a living thing AT ALL to be born or to die?

As a language researcher who has been bewildered by the fundamental nature of language and has spent hours pondering, studying, and discussing the above questions, I can assure you that Language is the most organic product of human mind! It is as alive as the planet itself when in use and as dead as a lifeless log chopped long ago when abandoned.

So, YES! Languages die every day…thousands of them, when they are abandoned by their native speakers. To the uninitiated, it might seem like a harmless, everyday occurrence, not worth paying any attention to…

But as a Historical Linguist who studies language change and language death in detail, the death of a language is as alarming and significant as the death of a community. Those who are reading about this for the time, please be informed that just like biodiversity, languages too fall into the categories of ‘rare’, ‘endangered’ and ‘extinct’.

Treading this line of inquiry, I worked on a historical period of Marathi (my mother tongue) from about 800 years ago, for my Ph.D. research. The central idea was to find out why was I, as a Modern day 21st century Marathi speaker unable to understand the older avatar of my own language? How did Marathi look and sound 800 years ago? And research specifically, what were the linguistic components of Marathi that changed from the 1300s to 2000s - from Middle Marathi to Modern Marathi. As a corollary this research was also supposed to mirror the language changes that occurred in other adjacent languages of the (Western) Indo-Aryan language family like Rajasthani, Marwari, Konkani, Gujarati and so on…

This project lasted for over 6 years and was full of surprises, learning adventures and growth all the way! It led me to creating a rather small but decent corpus (an annotated, searchable digital collection) of 18,000 words in Middle Marathi which is the first of its kind for this language in this period.

This research, which felt like an eternity (mostly because I was working alone and in unsuitable conditions like 2 years of pandemic and lockdowns affecting field trips and data collections) is a miniscule part of the larger puzzle: How have Indian languages changed and appeared at different stages of their life spans?

Sometimes, languages morph into different versions of their earlier stages (case in point here). Usually this happens to popular languages that have millions of speakers. With other lesser popular languages that have only a few hundreds of native speakers, local languages first get overshadowed by other ‘powerful’ or economically more profitable languages and are eventually abandoned and forgotten. Left to die their slow deaths into oblivion…

To those who have read my earlier posts on sustainability, it might appear strange that I am now talking about languages and linguistics! But truly, I do see an obvious connection between sustainable living and language conservation. This might appear like a strange angle to sustainability but hear me out: Local languages, dialects, and traditional cultures are actually very similar to local businesses- they carry ancient wisdom and secrets unique to their small ecosystems. As an unfortunate consequence of Globalisation and Post-Colonial hangover, thousands of traditional languages succumb to a handful of 'languages of power' each year all over the world pregnant with all the valuable ancestral knowledge :( It is my most cherished personal endeavour as a researcher of languages to document, digitise and patronise local languages to promote a sustainable environment for languages of the world!

This task has been discredited as ridiculously ambitious by experts in the field and it probably is. However, I am glad that I began somewhere… I am FAR from knowing the solution to prevent rampant loss of local languages in the world and who knows if documenting a dying language is even a real solution. But it is better than not doing anything about it! And sometimes, that’s the only thing one can do.

This is my first research centric article where I have tried to explain my work and research background in a short and non-technical manner for everybody to understand. Any and every feedback is therefore welcome and appreciated:

Did this topic and line of inquiry seem interesting to you? Would you like to know more about this field? If yes, what would you specifically like to know?

Let me know in the comments section!