Bringing Mother Tongues Back Home
A language goes extinct in the world not because native speakers stop using them, but because parents stop using their mother tongues within their family.
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A language goes extinct in the world not because native speakers stop using them, but because parents stop using their mother tongues within their family.
This is the critical conclusion made by Living Tongue, a non-profit international institution that carries out researches and practical programs to maintain languages in the world and protect them from extinction, after years of seeking the reason why many languages in the world continue to decline and eventually disappear.
Today, Feb. 21, the world is commemorating International Mother Language Day, which was established by UNESCO in 1999 and was recognized by the UN in 2008.
The establishment of the mother language day is to remind countries in the world, including Indonesia, to continue with their efforts for the preservation, revitalization and promotion of multilingual learning models in schools and communities, so that people continue to use their mother tongues.
It is also important to take care of the plurality of languages as a "gentong", or a space for restoring the cultural diversity of a nation.
In terms of language extinction, studies on the life of languages have covered four basic typologies on the “health status” of about 6,000 languages in the world: 1) healthy (safe); 2) eroding (vulnerable); 3) nearly extinct (severely endangered); and (4) extinct.
According to Barbara F. Grimes in Ethnologue: Languages of the World (2000), there are 7,099 languages in the world. Of these, 330 languages have native speakers of 1 million or more. In comparison, approximately 450 languages in the world have very few native speakers who are mostly elderly, so these languages are heading toward extinction.
More astonishingly, the decline in the number of native speakers in different parts of the world is occurring faster than expected. In its release prepared for International Mother Language Day 2018, UNESCO even noted that within two weeks, two languages in the world will die.
Eastern Indonesian languages
Indonesia is a Southeast Asian country that extends to the Pacific that has the second largest number of languages in the world. According to the Language Agency at the Culture and Education Ministry, Indonesia has 652 regional languages that are spoken as native languages. The Summer Institute of Linguistics lists 720 languages. Papua New Guinea has the largest number of regional languages, with about 820 languages.
Of the 652 (or 720) languages in Indonesia, about a half are spread across eastern Indonesia. In keeping with the imaginary line created by Alfred Wallace that distinguishes biodiversity, the diversity of languages in eastern Indonesia is also very high.
There are about 40 languages in Sulawesi, about 200 in Papua, 90 in Maluku and North Maluku and about 60 languages in East Nusa Tenggara.
However, the high diversity of languages in eastern Indonesia stands in contrast to the ability of these languages to survive the threat of extinction. According to surveys by several organizations, dozens of eastern Indonesian languages have the status “eroding”, or experiencing a decline in life power, and some are even "dying", if not extinct.
For example, several languages in Papua, Maluku and North Maluku only have dozens of speakers mostly aged over 60. Ten years ago, the Ibo language in West Halmahera, North Maluku, had only five speakers, all more than 70 years old. Perhaps the number of speakers is even fewer today.
There are several reasons for the extinction of eastern Indonesia languages. The preference of people to use one language as lingua franca for communicating, such as Malay, is one of the key reasons. The other reason is that parents of young families in multilingual communities across eastern Indonesia have chosen to use the local Malay language for speaking at home, especially in communicating with their children. This means that children born into the current generation have no chance to inherit their mother tongue from their parents; their mother language is the local Malay language.
Under such a condition, children in the kampungs no longer use their parents’ mother tongue as their primary language when they play with the peers. They have lost their parents’ mother tongue, and this is also happening outside the home: They have also lost the kampung’s mother tongue. If this continues, within one or two generations, two important facts will emerge: The children will lose their parents’ mother tongue, which will be displaced by the local Malay language.
Another cause of language extinction is social mobility, both vertical and horizontal, as a result of urbanization and encounters between speakers of different languages within the socioeconomic setting.
Learning your village language
Living Tongue\'s findings and facts on the continuity of a number of languages in Indonesia, especially in eastern Indonesia, increasingly confirm that language extinction does not occur in schools, at work or in other public spaces. The mother tongue is actually kicked out of its "own home" by the language’s native “owners”.
As mother tongue extinction occurs at home and in the family environment, these languages should be brought back into the family home to protect them from extinction. This means that including the mother tongue in the school curriculum is not the correct solution to prevent regional languages from going extinct.
Parents as the “final” heirs of their mother tongues are being encouraged to use the mother tongue with their children, through a movement that urges learning the language of our hometowns. In adopting the "home school" or "natural school" model, parents can participate in ensuring that the mother tongue is spoken daily at home.
A mother tongue is acquired naturally, not through formal learning at schools. Because of this, the most effective way to save mother tongues from the threat of extinction is to provide children with the opportunity to speak their mother tongue at home and in their own kampung.
Gufran A Ibrahim, Language Agency, the Culture and Education Ministry; Anthropolinguistics Professor, Khairun University, Ternate
