Collective and urgent duty to safeguard mother languages (Part 1)

Since 2000, International Mother Language Day has been celebrated globally on February 21. The purpose of this celebration is to advocate for the protection of mother languages, including tribal languages, for the generations to come.

These languages need to be protected because they are knowledge banks of different cultures and civilisations. When they fade, they take with them an invaluable wealth of history, creativity, knowledge, and legacy of the people of that particular culture.

According to the United Nations, these mother languages are also crucial in attaining the set Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as they help to communicate culture and knowledge and to keep peace, harmony, and social integration.

It is beneficial to have more non-divisive linguistic diversity and multilingual societies. More languages also need to be empowered and adopted for education and formal usage to help bring the services closer to the hearts and lives of the people. It will also help in the efficiency of the services being delivered. As per UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/61/266, governments must have in place measures to protect all mother languages used by the people.

Globally, the generational transition of mother languages is fading and is particularly affected by the migration trends, career aspirations, and digital exposure of younger generations, which make them conversant with international languages early. In the same regard, most international languages are seen as superior and more important as compared to indigenous mother languages, which reduces the use of the latter.

In the education field, there is also a question of ease of learning when one is taught in their language. When students are taught in a language different from theirs, they use a lot of mental strength to translate and transliterate before they can express or apply their thoughts. While this can be unavoidable, given the broader and global visions, their languages should not be negated as bad or useless, and their capacity to learn should not be solely attached to their capacities in the new languages.

Children can be encouraged to learn foreign languages even without being told their mother languages are not good enough. This way they will keep their love towards their mother languages and will not feel ashamed to use them.

The extinction is real. According to the United Nations, over 1000 languages have gone to complete extinction. According to Ethnologue cumulative research, a language dies every 40 days. By the year 2022, over 3000 languages were considered endangered, which is about 40 percent of global languages.

Tanzania is also listed among countries with endangered languages. The Endangered Languages Project report states that at least two languages have gone extinct (in Tanzania), and at least 20 languages are considered extremely endangered.

In his research on Tanzanian endangered languages published by the South African Journal of African Languages, Prof Karsten Legere highlights that priority should be given in research and documentation to the group of languages categorised as L1, which are Akie (Okiek), Asaax, Bungu/Wungu, Burunge, Gweno, Hadza, Ikizu, Isanzu, Kisi, Magoma, Mbugu (Ma’a), Mbugwe, Mbunga, Mwera (Nyasa), Ndonde, Ngasa (Ongamo), Pimbwe, Shashi, Sonjo (Temi), Vidunda, and Wanda.

He also said in the research that all languages spoken in the coastal regions should be included in this priority list as well (Karsten Legère, Language Endangerment in Tanzania: Identifying and Maintaining Endangered Languages, 2012). This was 13 years ago, and the research focused on languages with less than 20,000 speakers. There are chances that many more languages have fallen to that focus group at the moment because of rural-urban migration, widespread use of Kiswahili and emergent use of English in the country beyond the educational circles.

On a global scale, another solution is to digitise the endangered languages. UNESCO, during the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, established a platform to help with digitising languages. The IYIL2019 website has remained a treasure for tools and resources on how to digitally protect and promote languages. When a language is digitised, it can be easily accessed by people from all over the world, making it easy to research and propagate it. It is more difficult when a language is also completely geographically limited and without literature.

More local efforts are needed in this regard to have our local languages preserved. While as Tanzanians we consider Kiswahili to be more unifying, safeguarding tribal languages will not harm our unity. Unity is not necessarily uniformity; we can have unity in diversity, which in turn will allow us to learn from the treasures of different traditions and cultures in our country.

When we lose a language, we lose not only communication but also culture, wisdom, art, and the entire worldview of the people of that linguistic group. We also need to positively motivate our young people to love indigenous languages and own them courageously and proudly.

To be continued...

Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student at Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, in Manila, Philippines. Website: www.shimbopastory.com