LANGUAGE IS LIFE. WE CAN RESCUE IT FROM EXTINCTION.
Derived from Latin Lingua which means tongue and the French term langue, language is the “entire complex of phenomena associated with human vocal and auditory communication of emotions and ideas.”
Language is called a social phenomenon, because it has relevance only in a social setting. Language undergoes a continuous, though unnoticed, process of growth and change. It becomes sharp, crisp, refined and versatile with the passage of time. Pick up the historical background of any language; you will be astonished to notice the major changes in spellings, meaning, pronunciation and its connotation and denotation. Hence, language is a living phenomenon.
In its broadest and most general sense, “language may be said to be any means of expression or mental concepts by any living beings whatsoever and of communicating them to, or receiving them from, other living beings.”
Language is a very complex human phenomenon; all attempts in define it have proved inadequate. In common parlance it may be said that language is an organised noise used in actual social situations. Thai is why it is defined as contextualised systematic sounds. Patanjali defined it as that human expression which is uttered out by speech Organs. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines language as “a system of conventional, spoken or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, communicate”.
1. “Language is a primarily human and non- instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols” (Sapir).
2. “Language, in its widest sense, means the sum total of such signs of our thoughts and feelings as are capable of external perception and as could be produced and repeated at will” (A. H. Gardiner).
3. “Language may be defined as the expression of thought by means of speech-sounds” (Henry Sweet).
4. “A system of communication by sound i.e., through the organs of speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventional meanings.” (Mario A Pei & Frank Gaynor).
5. Language is human…a verbal systematic symbolism… a means of transmitting information…a form of social behaviour… (with a) high degree of convention” (J. Whatmough).
6. “A language (is a) symbol system… based on pure or arbitrary Convention… infinitely extendable and modifiable according to the l bunging needs and conditions of the speakers” (R. H. Robins).
7. “A language is a device that establishes sound-meaning correlations, pairing meanings with signals to enable people to exchange ideas through observable sequences of sound” (Ronals W. Langacker).
8. “A language is “audible, articulate human speech as produced by the action of the tongue and adjacent vocal organs… The body of words and methods of combining words used and understood by a considerable community, especially when fixed and elaborated by long usage; a tongue” (Webster).
Imagine that you are the last speaker of your language. Every other person who
ever spoke your language has passed away. You no longer have anyone to talk to in your
own tongue. Family and friends of your generation, with whom you could have spoken,
have died. Your children never learned your language and instead use the language of
outsiders. If you want to interact with anyone at all, you must use a foreign language. In
shops and newspapers, on television and radio, everything is in a foreign language, and
you have no hope of ever seeing your language used in such situations. And, because you
never have the chance to use and practice it, you find yourself forgetting pieces of your
own language. There are words you used to know but cannot remember, and there is no
one you can ask. It is also likely that you alone remember the traditional ways of your
people, how you used to live; everyone else has moved on to live more “modern” lives.
You feel a sense of loneliness even when surrounded by people.
The loss of a language is devastating not only for those who speak it, however; it
is also devastating to those who study languages. Linguists can learn a lot about human
language in general from an examination of the forms found in endangered languages.
With every loss of a language the pool of linguistic data, and with it the scope of the
ability to learn about our world, shrinks. Endangered languages can be great sources of
information, if only we can reach them before the last speakers die.
IGEDE language is our life, we have a collective responsibility to rescue it from extinction.
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