LANGUAGE IN INDIA

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
A UNIQUE PROJECT TO SAVE THEM
A Report from the School of Oriental and African Studies

Dr. Peter K. Austin is the Director of a very unique project to save the endangered languages around the world. He is the Märit Rausing Professor in Field Linguistics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. The department focuses on developing projects to describe the endangered languages, record the materials from these languages, and disseminate a variety of information concerning languages around the world. Scholars in India and in the developing nations will be interested in the projects undertaken by this department. So, we give below an outline of this project as outlined in their annual reports.

THREAT OF IMMINENT EXTINCTION FOR MANY LANGUAGES

Today, the sum total of human language and culture is represented by about 6,500 languages and at least half of these are under threat of imminent extinction. In fact, it is estimated that all three thousand or so could be extinct before this century is over (with some scholars estimating the number as even higher, up to 90% language loss).

SKEWED DISTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGES

The distribution of languages in the modern world is highly skewed: 96% of the world's population speaks just 4% of the languages, with the top ten languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi and Spanish having half the world's population as speakers. This means that 96% of the world's languages have just 4% of the population speaking them: there are many small languages with communities of a few hundred or thousand speakers (or in some cases in Australia, the Pacific, and the Americas as few as one or two speakers remain). The geographical distribution of languages and language groups is also biased as the following table from Nettle and Romaine (2000:37) Vanishing Voices (OUP) shows.

A REASON FOR THE LOSS OF LANGUAGES

Clearly Europe as the lowest level of language diversity in world terms, and the colonial spread of European languages has been one of the major causes of indigenous language loss elsewhere.

PRELITERATE LANGUAGES MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO EXTINCTION

In addition to these unbalanced distributions, most of the small and endangered languages come from cultures without a writing tradition; their loss will leave no record of their existence if they are not recorded now. Language extinction on a massive scale is thus a strong possibility - and one that disturbs many members of the linguistics community and the general public.

HRELP

The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) was established with a commitment of ?20 million from the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund to document as many endangered languages as possible and to encourage the development of relevant skills. It has the following three components:

1. Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP). Designed to provide approximately ?15 million over an 8-10 year period in competitive research grants to encourage the development of linguistic fieldwork in endangered languages (especially by younger scholars) and to support documentation of as many threatened languages as possible. ELDP is governed by an international selection panel chaired by Professor Barry Supple; its grants are administered by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
2. Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP). Aimed at training the next generation of language documents, it offers students an array of opportunities: a new MA in Language Documentation and Description, a PhD in Field Linguistics, and post-doctoral fellowships as SOAS. We also offer a comprehensive programme of public lectures, seminars and training courses. Professor Peter K. Austin, Märit Rausing Chair in Field Linguistics, is Director of ELAP.
3. Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR). Due to be established at SOAS during the 2003-04 academic year, we aim to make it one of the primes resources for study and methodology in the field of digital language archiving. Mr. David Nathan has been appointed as the ELAR archivist and will join SOAS full-time in January 2004.

THE MISSION OF HRELP

The mission of HRELP is to:

1. Train new generations of linguists to research and develop work that opens up new fields of study;
2. Provide opportunities for fieldworkers, academics, students, collaborative ventures, and international organizations to work together with endangered language communities to ensure that everything possible is done to record and encourage linguistic, cultural and human diversity;
3. Award approximately ?1 million a year in research grants to high quality projects;
4. Set up an innovative comprehensive endangered languages archive as a leading international academic resource;
5. Endeavor to raise as much additional funds as possible to build the scale, scope and effectiveness of our work. We are establishing a fund-raiser position in coming months;
6. Welcome all those able to donate time, money or expertise to help build on the solid base HRELP has established.

THE SIZE OF THE TASK

In 2003, ELDP provided 21 grants, totaling ?1.194m, to study and document over 30 urgently endangered languages across six continents. Each year for the next seven years, the International Panel aims to distribute similar sums on an annual basis. In addition, at SOAS ELAP staff are working on over 30 languages currently, meaning that potentially up to 270 languages could be documented at some level by 2010 as a result of HRELP's initiative alone.

But that is only part of the task, for all our efforts to be truly successful, everyone interested in the issue needs to be aware of what is being done - and where. The more documentation that is known about, the more easily language researches can avoid duplication. It is important that researchers and communities get in contact with one another, enter into collaborative ventures and co-ordinate research with others working in the same area, because this is the surest way of maximizing benefit to the endangered language communities we are working with.

In order for this to happen effectively there needs to be international collaboration between researchers and archivists to document the documentation projects that are currently underway. We need to provide an ever more comprehensive reference list of endangered language projects that we know about around the world. To this end there have been discussions between HRELP and other archives about setting up an organization called DELAMAN: Digital Endangered Language and Music Archive Network to co-ordinate and share information about active researchers, documenters and language communities that are engaged in projects, as well as sharing experiences and expertise in archiving, metadata and publication. It is anticipated that DELAMAN will be established in the near future.

Contact Prof. Peter K. Austin, pa2@soas.ac.uk, for further information. Departments of Linguistics in India, and in all the South Asian countries should really help this project by actively participating in the study of minor languages.

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