Dr. Asangba Tzudir
Today, several of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages face a grave risk of going extinct. A lead study author Tatsuya Anamo at the University of Cambridge in England said that, Ainu, a language in Japan, is now seriously threatened with only 10 native speakers left. The United Nations has noted that half of the languages spoken today will ‘disappear’ by the end of this century if nothing is done to save them.
Naga tribes’ language is not spared of such risks. There are certain factors compounding this risk. Within the waves of ‘modernity’ and its associated changes, urbanization has posed a serious threat through the ‘shift’ from its original ‘performative’ space to places of heterogeneous community. As such, nagamese has comfortably nestled in many Naga homes while English has become the ‘flavoured’ language besides the adoption in ‘official’ spaces.
Now, the threat is not simply about the tribes’ language not spoken but more so the loss of tribes’ cultural identity. The richness of any Naga tribes’ language is manifested through the expression of cultural elements and facets in their day to day life, without which it becomes just another dialect that enables simple communication. The process of urbanisation and the shift from original space is slowly reducing tribes’ language to a simple dialect.
Even in one’s tribe language, words of other language finds adapted. How do you say, ‘I am going to the market’ in your tribes’ language. One might generally end up using the word ‘bazaar.’ The form of adaptation has also reduced the Naga tribes’ language to just another dialect further distancing away from the cultural connectedness which each cultural word connotes.
Religion is also playing its part of creating violence on traditional culture and practices which has posed a serious threat to tribes’ language. The coming of Christianity has created various forms of conflicts between traditional cultural practices and religion. Cultural ‘memorabilia’ and other ‘cultural artifacts’ that tells and retells the stories of the Naga past are fast disappearing and religion also plays its own part. The presence of which manifests not only cultural vibrancy but also revive language within its cultural context where language can be meaningfully employed as a tool to express culture, because at the heart of cultural expression is its language without which it gets reduced to a simple dialect.
The threats are therefore, not just about language becoming extinct but losing its real essence, meaning and therefore relevance of a language. Having said so, tribes’ language needs to be given due attention because therein lies the real Naga identity.
Today, while the many factors prevents one from speaking one’s own tribe language, it also needs to be seen that tribes’ language first need to get adapted with the truth about the Naga past life, traditional culture and its associated practices in order to recreate a process of speaking one’s tribes’ language. If the past cultural life is shrouded in an amalgam of truth and lies, the language employed in its expression not only loses its popularity as a medium of communication but also becomes a disgrace and loses its relevance as an expression of culture.
In a world of social media explosion, as a contest, the culture of telling truth stories need to be revived from within the families in order to rebuild ones tribe language within a system of truth and also as a popular medium of communication.
(Dr. Asangba Tzudir writes a weekly guest editorial for The Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
