NEW! Are Your Children Speaking Your Mother Tongue?
Written by Jakoyo George |
One morning in around 1992, I went to consult with Professor Kembo Sure who was taking us in a course in language acquisition at Moi University. I observed that the don was working on some charts meant for primary schools in the then created Suba District. Sixteen years down the lane I have come to understand the gravity of the assignment. The task was an attempt at reviving and conserving language of the minority Suba which was under threat by Dholuo spoken by the domineering Luo people.
It is now a major concern of linguists that minority languages are threatened with extinction as their dominant neighbours gain wider acceptability as regional or national lingua francas especially in the African continent.
Margaret Obondo in From Trilingual to Bilinguals? A study of the Social and Linguistic Consequences of Language Shift on a Group of Urban Luo Children in Kenya (1996) observes that a survey of minority languages and death in Africa by the Institute of African Languages at the University of Cologne reveals that nearly 200 of the 1500 languages that are currently estimated to exist in Africa are in danger of becoming extinct by the end of this century.
Specific cases of languages lost are being lost include Weyto (Ethiopia); dead; Shabo (S.E. Ethiopia) threatened, (Southern Lake Turkana) dead and speakers have shifted to Samburu; Ongamo (Mt Elgon) threatened; Tenet (Southern Sudan) theatened; Suba (Rusinga and Mfangano Islands) being revived.
A language is considered dead if no native speaker speaks it. In linguistics, language death (sometimes pejoratively as linguicide) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that the speakers possess of a given language idiom is decreased. Total language death occurs when all native speakers die.
In the Bible, the original language, which is called “the language of Adam”, was lost at the Tower of Babel. This is the language Adam used to name all that was on earth as God commanded him.
Latin is considered a dead language because in spite of its use by many nations, none is an original speaker. In Kenya other endangered languages include El Molo which has only 300 speakers, Pongok from Western, which was absorbed by the Luhya and the Tiriki. On the brink of extinction are: Boni, Kore, Segeju and Dahalo from the Coast; Kinare, Sogoo, Lorkoti and Yakuu in the Central, Omotik in the South and Terik in the West.
Globally, over the 21st century, about half of the approximately 6,000 used in the world today are likely to disappear.
David Crystal in his book Language Death presents empirical evidence that reveals that one language dies roughly every two weeks. This projection is alarming! Is your child speaking your mother tongue?
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