Imagine the loss of the freedom to speak your native language! Yes, it is the loss of a fundamental human right. We should protect our language, culture and history. But sometimes, that is not an easy job or not even an option. It had been same for millions and millions of people worldwide. Here is a real story of pain and tragedy- the story of a language nearing death, like many other languages. But at the same time, it is a story of hope and determination and the unflinching spirit to keep the language alive.
We are talking about an indigenous language that has been around for more than 20,000 years. The South African language named ‘N|uu’ is the most endangered language in the entire world and is at risk of becoming extinct. It has just one fluent speaker left – Ouma Katrina Esau who is 90 years old.
Esau, the last remaining speaker of N|uu, is striving hard to keep alive the dying language by passing it on to the new generation with the help of her granddaughter and local linguists. She has lived like millions of others with a buried language and a buried identity for a long time. But then, against all odds, decided to stand up for its revival.
How N|uu Became a Near Extinct Language?
N|uu is a click language, pronounced with a clicking sound between the ‘N’ and the ‘uu’, that derives from the San people, who are members of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa. They originated from the ǂKhomani people who hailed from southern Kalahari, a savannah on the modern-day borders of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Historically, the language was spoken and heard, not inscribed. So, there is very little written evidence of the N|uu language, making its history and age very tricky to trace.
It started to get into trouble during the arrival of the British Empire in the 19th century. As part of their ruthless attempt to control Africa, the British naively set up political boundaries, many of which cut across people’s homelands. The Empire made active efforts to repress native African languages in favour of English and Afrikaans, a language derived from the form of Dutch brought to southern Africa by European Protestant settlers in the 17th century. Many San people were belittled, beaten, and even killed for speaking N|uu.
To make matters worse, people were stripped of their ethnic and cultural identity. Instead of being recognized by their real ethnic identity, such as San, people were clumsily put by British Empire into main categories- White, Black, Indian, and “Coloured” (meaning people with a mixed ethnic background).
“This was the beginning of the demise in a way because it started to separate people. Their families were split up,” Dr Kerry Jones, a linguist and Director of African Tongue, an organization that looks to preserve and promote endangered languages of southern Africa, told IFLScience.
The Beginning of Revival
When Ouma Katrina Esau was a girl in South Africa’s Northern Cape, she had also stopped speaking her mother tongue, N|uu, after being mocked by other people and told it was an “ugly language”. Instead, she spoke Afrikaans, the language promoted by South Africa’s white minority rulers.
After decades of colonial rule and apartheid, many others feared the language had fallen into extinction by the end of the 20th century. That was until the sociolinguist Dr Nigel Crawhall and the United Nations initiated efforts to revive N|uu in the mid-1990s. The South African San Institute soon became involved and tracked down 25 people scattered by the eviction who were able to speak or at least understand the language.
Unfortunately, many were elderly and have since passed away, taking their knowledge of the language with them and by December 2021 only Ouma Katrina Esau remained who could speak the N|uu language fluently.
Undying Spirit of the Nonagenarian
Ouma, or “grandmother” Katrina started teaching N|uu to local children around year 2005 and later opened a school with her granddaughter and language activist Claudia Snyman. Despite never having had the opportunity to learn to read herself, Ouma Katrina worked with her granddaughter, Claudia Snyman, to create a N|uu children’s book called Qhoi n|a Tijho (Tortoise and Ostrich) in 2021.
Ouma Katrina has spent the past few years meticulously working to preserve the N|uu language. Together with Dr Kerry Jones and other members of the community, she has helped to create a digital N|uu language dictionary to keep the language alive. In March 2023, the University of Cape Town bestowed an honorary doctorate on Ouma Katrina Esau for her invaluable work for preservation of the language. The event encompassed the unveiling of the N|uu-language dictionary.
In May 2024, Ouma Katrina became an integral part of a program that’s teaching local school kids the basics of N|uu. For the first time in decades, knowledge of this dying language is being passed on to the next generation.
Like many indigenous languages, N|uu was crushed by insensitivity and cultural homogenization. It is unlikely to be a mother tongue ever again but the unflinching efforts of a nonagenarian and her community are giving back N|uu its lost dignity.
Languages Disappearing Worldwide
The loss of a languages is more than just the disappearance of words. It erases an integral part of cultural heritage, disconnecting communities from their traditions and histories. Buried languages become buried identities of their speakers and eventually buried cultures.
SIL Ethnologue, is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. As per SIL Ethnologue, there are 7,164 living languages as of July 2024. And 3,045 languages are now endangered that’s over 42%, often with fewer than 1,000 users remaining. Meanwhile, just 23 languages account for more than half the world’s population.
As per United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), a language becomes extinct when nobody speaks or remembers the language. It has categorized languages on basis of endangerment as Vulnerable, Definitely Endangered, Severely Endangered and Critically Endangered.
In 2009, the UNESCO launched the interactive electronic version of its ‘Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing’ cataloguing some 2,500 endangered languages worldwide. The 2009 data shows that out of the 6,000 languages in existence, over 200 have died out over the last three generations, 538 are critically endangered, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe. According to the Atlas, nearly 200 languages have fewer than 10 speakers and 178 others have between 10 and 50 speakers.
According to a report released in 2018 by United Nations, 96 per cent of the world’s approximately 6,700 languages are spoken by only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Although indigenous people make up less than 6% of the global population, they speak more than 4,000 of the world’s languages. Conservative estimates suggest that more than half of the world’s languages will become extinct by 2100. Other calculations predict that up to 95 per cent of the world’s languages may become extinct or seriously endangered by the end of this century. The majority of the languages that are under threat are indigenous languages. It is estimated that one indigenous language dies every two weeks.
In 2022, UNESCO launched ‘The World Atlas of Languages’ (WAL) which provides accurate, reliable, up-to-date and robust data on the world’s languages. According to the WAL, there are 8324 languages, spoken or signed, documented by the governments, public institutions and academic communities; out of 8324, around 7000 languages are still in use.
The endangerment of languages can result from various factors, including globalization and cultural assimilation, urbanisation and migration, cultural stigma and marginalisation and socioeconomic pressures.
The Vanishing Voices of India
About linguistic diversity in India, it is said that India writes in many languages and speaks in many more voices. But many of these voices have been vanishing slowly. Recently it was reported that Madhika, a language spoken by the Chakaliya community that migrated from Karnataka centuries ago, is fast becoming extinct with the younger generation opting for Malayalam. Only two people, K.P. Narayanan, 87, and his niece Rajputhri, living in a village of Kerala, are the last fluent speakers of Madhika. The language is a blend of Telugu, Tulu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
It’s not just Madhika that’s under threat of being extinct in India. Today, there are 197 languages in India whose survival is in peril. This is the largest number for any country in the world, going by UNESCO’s Atlas of The World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing. The journey of these languages towards disappearance had started long back.
In 1871, the British Colonial government brought in the Criminal Tribes Act which described certain communities (mostly nomadic tribes) as criminals by birth. The members of such tribes were restricted in terms of movement and people they could socialise with. In certain regions, entire caste groups were presumed guilty by birth, arrested, children separated from their parents, and held in penal colonies or quarantined without conviction or due process.
After independence, the Indian government replaced the Criminal Tribes Act with the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952 which re-stigmatised the already marginalised “criminal tribes”. Many communities which fall under the larger umbrella of De-notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes still suffer a stigma and are struggling to protect their languages as most of them ended up concealing their identities and stopped speaking their language.
The 1961 census recorded India as having 1,652 languages. The 1971 census mentioned only 108 languages. This was because the government decided not to disclose languages that are spoken by less than 10,000 people. According to the 2011 census, there are 122 major languages and 1,599 other languages spoken across the nation. As per latest government figures, there are 22 scheduled languages and the remaining fall under the ‘all others’ section or the non-scheduled languages. At least 300 languages are no longer traceable since independence.
The Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Vadodara, headed by cultural activist and writer Ganesh N Devy, conducted the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) from 2010-2012. The survey identified 780 Indian languages, out of which about 600 are potentially endangered. Of the total languages covered under the PLSI, 22 are scheduled languages, 480 are languages spoken by tribal and nomadic tribes, about 80 are coastal languages, and the remaining are languages spoken by other groups in India. Hindi is the most popular language-spoken by 40 crore people. As per Devy, India may have lost 220 languages since 1961. India has 197 languages that are classified as vulnerable or endangered. Devy has once said aptly, “When a language dies, something irreplaceable dies”.
One of the reasons behind languages becoming extinct in India is that the government defines a language as one that is marked by a script. Also, after the 1971 census, the Indian government declared that any language spoken by less than 10,000 people did not need to be included in the official list of languages. The 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution now recognizes only 22 major languages. As a result, more unscripted languages are now facing the danger of extinction.
Reviving Lost Tongues Around the World
Each language that dies is a culture system that is lost. Like an animal or bird species falling into extinction, a language being extinct is a loss of the world’s richness and beauty. There are 7,000 living languages in the world and around 3,000 are considered as endangered. This means that almost half of the planet’s current linguistic diversity is under threat. Of thousands of indigenous languages spoken today, 4 out of 10 are in danger of disappearing. Experts have said it might take a decade of action to reverse the historic destruction of age-old dialects. As globalization progresses, many of these languages face the threat of extinction, with the parent generation often being the last fluent speakers.
The preservation of endangered languages is imperative in safeguarding the rich tapestry of human communication. Linguists and anthropologists are working on documenting endangered languages, creating dictionaries, and compiling grammatical resources. Some communities and organizations are implementing language revitalization programs, including language classes, cultural events, and publications.
United Nations observed the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019 to raise awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of Indigenous languages across the world, with an aim to establish a link between language, development, peace, and reconciliation. The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the period between 2022 and 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to draw global attention on the critical situation of many indigenous languages and to mobilise stakeholders and resources for their preservation, revitalization and promotion.
Apart from this some global organisations such as Wikitongues, Endangered Languages Project, Glossika Viva, Our Mother Tongues, Endangered Language Fund, Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and many others are dedicated to documenting and reviving endangered languages around the world.
Preserving Endangered Languages in India
In India, Centre and state governments are recognizing the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and supporting initiatives for language preservation.
The Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, established in 1969, works on the protection, preservation, and documentation of the country’s languages that have become endangered or likely to be endangered in the near future. It monitors the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages of India (SPPEL) initiated in 2013 by the Ministry of Education. In the first phase of the scheme, 117 endangered languages have been listed for the documentation. In the coming years, about 500 lesser-known languages are estimated to be documented. Documentation of languages will take place by creating grammar, dictionary and ethno-linguistic profiles.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has also initiated two schemes for the protection of endangered languages, namely ‘Funding Support to the State Universities for Study and Research in Indigenous and Endangered Languages in India’ and ‘Establishment of Centres for Endangered Languages in Central Universities’. A sum of Rs.45.89 crores was released by the UGC and CIIL under their schemes for protection of endangered Indian languages during the years 2015-16 to 2019-20, according to a press release by Ministry of Culture.
Apart from this, several non-profit organisations are also making efforts to document and preserve native languages.
Experts say that apart from these measures, content like audio-visual documentation of socio-cultural facets of the language such as storytelling, folk literature, oral culture and history can be created. Digital resources in a language by native speakers can be built in the form of content and linguistic tools to enhance the reach of the languages.
Technology to the Rescue
As we march forward into the digital age, technological advancements have played a pivotal role in the preservation of endangered languages.
The World Atlas of Languages (WAL), unveiled by UNESCO In 2022, is an initiative to preserve, revitalize and promote global linguistic diversity and multilingualism as a unique heritage and treasure of humanity. The WAL is an interactive and dynamic online tool that documents different aspects and features of language status in countries and languages around the world. It allows the demonstration of linguistic diversity in a multi-layered manner, taking advantage of technological and scientific progress.
AI can also play a significant role in language preservation by helping in the documentation of endangered languages. With the help of AI technologies, linguists and researchers can efficiently record and document linguistic data, including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. This can ensure that valuable information about these languages is preserved for future generations. AI can also contribute to the translation and transcription of languages. This can be useful in preserving and understanding endangered languages that may lack comprehensive translation resources.
Another way AI can contribute to language preservation is through its application in teaching and learning. AI-powered language learning platforms can provide interactive and personalized learning experiences, making it easier for individuals to engage with endangered languages. These platforms can incorporate speech recognition, natural language processing, and adaptive learning techniques to tailor lessons according to the learner’s proficiency level and learning style.
Microsoft for example runs Microsoft Translator Hub, a platform that allows communities and institutions to tap into the neural text and speech translation systems to come up with their own translation tools. Google is also working with developers and institutions to develop unique translation modules using open-source AI platforms like TensorFlow that save millions of transcribing hours. ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), an Australian institution working to conserve endangered languages on the continent, has designed Opie, a robot built on open-source AI platform TensorFlow that teaches indigenous languages to children through lessons, stories and games. Gabriel Emmanuel, a Nigerian innovator, has been working on an AI platform christened OBTranslate that seeks to address barriers to communication by translating over 2,000 African languages while preserving them for posterity.
In addition to preservation, AI holds potential in language revival efforts as well. Through the application of AI algorithms, extinct languages can be reconstructed by analysing linguistic data, such as written records, historical documents, and related languages. This can help revive languages that have been lost for centuries, allowing communities to reconnect with their linguistic heritage. Furthermore, AI can assist in creating learning materials for revived languages. By analysing existing linguistic resources and cultural artifacts, AI can generate grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and even audio samples for these revived languages. This can support language learners in their efforts to acquire and use these languages in everyday communication.
While the potential of AI in language preservation and revival is promising, there are challenges to overcome. These challenges include the need for extensive linguistic data, the ethical considerations surrounding AI-generated content, and the potential biases in language processing algorithms. However, successful projects and ongoing research demonstrate the positive impact AI can have on language preservation and revival. While researchers argue that language preservation initiatives inspired by AI cannot fully capture the essence of language, they are a crucial aspect of preserving what seems to be a global linguistic catastrophe. In fact, AI can prove to be a lifeline for endangered languages, helping to ensure that our global linguistic heritage remains vibrant and diverse for generations to come.
The Bottomline
As the saying goes, “a language is not just a way of communication, but a vessel of cultural identity.” While the dominance of English or other widespread languages is inescapable, efforts to raise awareness about endangered languages are important for the revival and protection of indigenous languages worldwide. Let’s not forget the story of Ouma Katrina Esau and her undying spirit for the revival of N|uu which shows that there’s a deeply human need to keep the lost languages, and through them the various cultures, alive.
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