What is your mother tongue or ancestral tongue?
Will the approximate 1400 indigenous Oceania languages survive until the next century?
Why is it that 97 per cent of the world’s population speak 4 per cent of its languages and only 3 per cent speak 96 per cent of them? (UNESCO, 2008)
Indigenous languages are terminated as like “gibbering of monkeys” or “barbaric tongues” and give way to civilised language (Brody, 2000).
Scholars believe the extermination and modification of indigenous languages are done through the imposition of the European languages, while others believe it is because of assimilation policies which behave as a form of ethnocide or linguistic genocide.
Renowned scholars believe the death of linguistic diversity has accelerated because of colonisation, nationalism and globalisation, while contrasting views consider the end of indigenous languages due to socioeconomic ecologies.
In the International Decade for Indigenous languages from 2022 to 2032, there has emerged a sense of urgency to reinvigorate native languages that have gone through intense linguistic colonisation.
This op-ed throws light on the historical discourse of eradicating indigenous languages for mass readers.
Systematic decline
The eradication of Indigenous culture, heritage and language is a long-term process aggravated during the period of colonisation.
This phase brought radical changes in indigenous government, material culture, identity and traditional practices.
Colonial hegemony was established in relation to the dominance of the coloniser’s language at the cost of indigenous languages.
Linguistic colonisation began with missionaries in the seventeenth century, after Europeans discovered Asia, Africa and Oceania.
They expanded religious influence to Christianise the local peoples and began to use local languages.
But Europeans considered local languages as primitive and thought them incapable of spreading Christian teachings.
Mühlhäusler (1996) explained in the context of the Pacific, the colonisers were left with adopting any of three alternatives to linguistically colonise: First to use the local lingua franca, meaning by forcefully choosing languages among the lingua franca adopted by missionaries and modernise them to promote Christian teachings among local.
The second option was to use a pidgin or a creole, initially criticised by missionaries, but later adopted and accepted widely.
Lastly, the use of the European languages was useful to propagate the message of Christianity without learning local languages and shall help them establish imperialism, as missionaries received assistance to spread European languages (Silva, 2019).
All these methods have a long-lasting impact on expanding the influence of European languages in the Pacific at the cost of indigenous ones.
Missionary linguistic projects had the objective to enforce their languages over the indigenous population.
The European settlers in these areas used a ploy to change the names of places and landmarks and rewrite history where indigenous peoples were excluded from the main subject and achievers.
Colonisers utilised many rules, regulations, authorities to establish control over the indigenous people’s languages, culture and heritage.
To justify colonisation, the colonisers established superiority over all indigenous structures and established their hegemony.
After the rise of imperialism and the establishment of many colonies of Africa, Asia and Oceania colonies, the structures and institutions were created to impose the European languages and systematically marginalise local indigenous languages.
The coloniser’s language/s was intentionally enforced by a government-sponsored mechanism that led to the oppression of colonised’s languages.
The colonisers considered the indigenous languages as impediments to modernity and implied hegemonic policies to systematically eradicate the colonisers’ languages.
Historical evidences are found that the educational system was manipulated where the young children studying in the residential school system away from their parents for a long duration were compelled to use coloniser’s languages and even given corporal punishment for using native language (Khawaja, 2021).
The children were placed in dormitories residential schools and separated from families to impose European languages on indigenous children, as it was easy to corrupt young minds rather than adults.
Other factors like local language policies, the presence of multiple indigenous languages, and the relocation of natives from their homeland also made colonisers language the lingua franca.
The colonial settlement saw the decline of indigenous languages, as enforcement of the use of colonial languages over indigenous languages.
Other factors that led to the death of language are physical danger of population died due to natural disasters; language shift because of intergenerational language transmission is disrupted by force (European disease caused
death and language loss of speech communities) or choice (move away from heritage language to another language); language is halted to be used as an official language (Eames, 2019).
Interaction and later clash of languages happened during colonisation, where the diverse group of people interacted with each other and later the particular groups were known with their languages.
This led to the establishment of hierarchies of these various people and their languages.
Some scholars believe socioeconomic ecology is the deciding factor for the success of any language rather than colonisers’ power to enforce the European languages over indigenous languages.
Mufwene (2002) considers languages to die gradually and inconspicuously as a result of their speakers’ communication practices.
This scholar believes the speakers destroy these languages because of their neglect as they choose different languages to communicate with speakers of other languages as a part of their adaptive response to present socioeconomic ecologies that require competence in the chosen language for their survival.
These languages did not lose to the languages of power, but to peers that have guaranteed better economic survival (Mufwene, 2002).
Conclusion
Claims are made that out of the world estimated 7500 languages, over half will be vanished by 2050.
The linguistic colonisation needs to be eradication, one best possible solution is to decolonise the mind to eradicate the language imposed by the colonisers over the colonised.
• PROF UNAISI NABOBO-BA- BA, Dean and Professor in Education, College of Humanities and Education and DR SAKUL KUNDRA is an assistant professor in history and Acting Head of School, School of Arts and Humanities, College of Humanities and Education, at Fiji National University. The views expressed are the authors and do not reflect the views of this newspaper.
