Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon

9. Killer or accessory to murder?

9 Killer or accessory to murder? Introduction The tenor of this chapter is partly indicative of the global gravity and the current tone of international debate on this topic of language death and decay. We are witnessing in South Asia, in East Asia, in Africa, and indeed across all the continents, escalating critical stages of endangerment, decay, and ultimately, the death of typologically and culturally diverse human languages. All of these visions and warnings of impending linguistic doom are not necessarily seen as the inevitable outcome of natural processes in the evolving survival of the fittest languages. The causation is often seen as motivated, intentional, and even planned. A lexicon of violent, potent, and wilfully initiated terminology about what is called linguicide and language death is growing. We see terms such as language suicide, language murder, and language genocide, or glottophagie (‘language eating’) and throwing away languages used to articulate these crises and the contexts in which such extinction takes place. In this acrimonious debate this string of violent terminology is often used to refer to the English language, as the major medium that causes the extinction of languages by its global presence, its functional power, and its penetration in Asian and African and European societies. This debate has multiple positions and one position is that of Fennell (2001: 266) who believes that ‘English is not a “killer” language in most instances, but it could definitely be called an “accessory to murder”.’ The wave of doom One might rightly ask: What are the indicators of these contexts of doom-inprogress ? The signals are in the changing profiles and dynamics of the decreasing functions of a majority of the world’s languages. The vanishing voices provide alarming signals that an overwhelming number of languages 166 Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon across cultures now have no speaking voices or at most a handful of the last surviving speakers. Consider, for example: a. Alawa, in northern Australia, has only 17–20 fluent speakers left; b. Achumavi, in northern California, has just 10 elderly speakers; c. The very last speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, is now 81 years old; d. Jack Butler, the last native speaker of Jiwarli, died in 1986; and e. Manx, as a native language, became extinct in 1900 on the Isle of Manx.1 We are now busy in the futile effort of embalming the dead languages. This dance of doom of languages is now visible to different degrees in all the regions of the world. The estimated current figure for languages in the world is 6,000, and the doomsday prediction is that this century will witness the last words of over 50 percent of these languages. This language extinction will, of course, be proportionally shared by India’s 387 languages,2 Indonesia’s 731 languages, Malaysia’s 140 languages, and the Philippines’s 172 languages (www.ethnologue.com). India is home to the fourth largest number of languages in the world. The other three countries are: Papua New Guinea (850); Indonesia (650); and Nigeria (410). The major instruments of LANGUAGE LEVELLING are rapid and unplanned expansion of the metropolitan areas, and aggressive efforts to implement assimilative language policies and educational curricula. Perhaps the most powerful instrument is what Krauss (1992: 6) characterizes as ‘cultural nerve gas’, referring to ‘electronic media bombardment’. This media has provided, Krauss adds, ‘an incalculably lethal new weapon’. This lethal weapon is aimed at ‘moribund’ and ‘endangered’ languages (Krauss, 1992: 4). The ‘moribund’ languages, Krauss continues, ‘are already doomed to extinction, like species lacking reproductive capacity’. In South Asia, to give one example, we witness the gradual extinction of a host of languages (see Table 9.1). The following are some randomly chosen examples. In the literature a variety of typologies have been presented to chart the horoscope of languages on the death or endangerment list (e.g. see Calvet, 1974; Edwards, 1992; Fase, Jaspaert and Kroon, 1992; Fishman, 1991; Grenoble and Whaley, 1998). If these typologies are applied to Asia and specifically to the Indian subcontinent, India is very high on the list. Killer or accessory to murder? 167 Table 9.1 Examples of endangered languages in South Asia Language Speakers Bangladesh Mru 18,000 Phalura 8,000 Chak 6,000 Pankua 3,000 Khyang 2,000 Kumi 2,000 India Agariya 98 Aimol 108 Anal 11,074 Andamanese 17 Angika 473 or 502 Ao 101 or 302 Nepal Sherpa...