Bridging the language divide
Why do languages decline ? What can be done to prevent this ?
I know four languages at different levels of proficiency.
My mother-tongue is Malayalam (മലയാളം). English was my language for learning during school & university. Later when I started working, English became my primary language for communicating as well as forming thoughts. I studied Hindi (हिंदी) till high school and would use it for casual chit chat with colleagues and friends. I also got introduced to Tamil (தமிழ்) language and the associated culture through my extended family.
Thinking back, I realised that I have hardly written anything in my mother-tongue since high school.(or any non-english language) Of late, this improved a little as typing in vernacular became easier on mobile phones, and social media made typing in vernacular languages popular and trendy.
My connection with non-english literature was through movies and music. Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi have thriving movie industries. India produced the most number of movies in the world. Hindi and Tamil are the two largest movie industries within India. Malayalam industry produces mainly low budget movies but with rich scripts, music and techniques.
Naturally, through these thriving movie industries, we get a connect with the culture, popular ideologies and the language. Unlike Hollywood, Indian movies have one or more songs featured in most of them. Many of these songs are written by brilliant lyricists. By singing them along, you also learn to appreciate the beauty of the language and some rare poetic words that you would never get to use otherwise.
The language divide — digital and otherwise
In the earlier days, languages were supported by the ruler or rich merchants through their patronage to music, dance, theatre, poetry & other forms of expressions. They were also used for administration and commerce in the local kingdoms. Religion also played an important role here as art and literature were forms of remembering or reaching out to divinity.
In the current age, many governments now support vernacular languages by offering them as part of school curriculum.
However, with a globalised and connected world, it is market forces that predominantly determine the the growth and decline of languages now.
- You learn languages that help you get a job or participate in the community’s conversation (on social media or otherwise)
- You then reduce usage of other languages that are now associated with a lower prestige
- Tools and technologies limit their support to languages used by the largest and more affluent user base
- This in turn becomes a self-reinforcing cycle where few languages get maximum number of resources
According to this insightful ted talk by Kalika Bali, four languages — Arabic, Chinese, English and Spanish take up the majority of technology resources now. For a monolingual of any of the less popular languages, many services powered by technology become less accessible — from search terms & filters of e-commerce sites to voice assistants. Sometimes less popular languages might be supported, but the quality of service will be quite lower than English. For building AI/ML based systems, basic building blocks like ‘word embeddings’ are more accurate for popular languages where you have lot of data available already in digital format.
Even on Wikipedia, there are huge asymmetries in the volume of online content in different language editions.74% of concepts have articles in only one language and 95% of concepts are in fewer than six languages. (source)
For 95% of the world’s languages, there is very little hope of crossing the digital divide. — András Kornai (Digital Language Death)
Part of the solution:
Some steps that can prevent the decline of languages
- Making vernacular languages available as part of school curriculum, with trained teachers
- Making easy to use language learning resources available widely
In addition to the above, we should also cultivate pride in using our own language and following cultural practices. Movies, music, arts etc. provide some economic incentives when the language is not popular for business communication. In-groups for using the language, and forums & platforms to interact are also equally important.
To make a small contribution in this direction, we are launching a tool for primary school students to practice Tamil(தமிழ்) through fun quizzes. They will also have cute monsters to help them in the learning journey.
- For expat Tamil speaking families across the world, this can be used as a tool to introduce basic Tamil to your kids. It offers a fun game like experience to practice Tamil after learning few concepts.
- For families in Singapore, the content is also aligned with the Singapore Tamil curriculum to make it more helpful for your kids.
You can signup for the product here.
Let’s pass on our languages to the next generation so that the society continues to be culturally diverse and inclusive.
