Tribal languages: India
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Tribal languages
The Times of India, Jun 08 2015
Joeanna Rebello
In February 2015, a representation of the three Mishmi tribes of Arunachal Pradesh -Idu, Kman and Taraon -met to discuss how to develop a writing system that would be true to their tongue. The Roman script they use currently allows too many slips twixt the alphabet and the lip. A reader cannot tell apart `sweet', `sour' and `red', with all spelt `shu'. “We noticed youngsters who write in Mishmi using the Roman script have stopped articulating certain speech sounds,“ says Sokhep Kri, general secretary of the Mishmi Welfare Society . Their concern is that if an increasingly literate population begins to elide certain indigenous speech sounds, it may alter the language itself. So the Mishmis are working with linguist Roger Blench, to develop a new writing system founded on the Roman alphabet but expanded by characters and diacritics (pronunciation marks over letters) indexed in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). “If we create a new script, we'll have the problem of promoting it,“ says Kri. “So we're building up from what we have.“
In Chattisgarh, Vikram Kumar Soni started from scratch. This district and sessions court clerk in Jagdalpur, district headquarters, has for a decade been preoccupied with promoting a linguistic script he designed for his tribe, the Halbi. Convinced the pho netic range of Halbi cannot be comprehensively articulated in Devanagari, the 47-year-old Soni created a unique script in 2006. Five years later, the script even acquired a font.
“Around seven lakh Halbi live in Chattisgarh; the rest are scattered across Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra,“ he says. In fact, Halbi has been occasionally indexed as a creole of Hindi, Marathi and Oriya, but is distinctive enough to be classified as an independent language. “ And a unique language deserves its own script,“ reasons Soni who holds a postgraduate degree in history .
Halbi isn't the only newcomer to the roster. Across the country , the movement for political and cultural assertion has, in the last couple of decades, led several tribal communities to devise indigenous writing systems. Warang Chiti, the script of the Ho, is 50 years old; Tolong Siki, of the Oraon is 25.
Most languages ride the coattails of an older, dominant script. It explains why the 2014 People's Linguistics Survey of India threw up only 64 scripts to 780 languages spoken here.But even as some linguists worry that a language loses its singular features in transmission, others see the evolution of new scr-ipts as a safeguard to a culture. For Dr Narayan Oraon, creator of Tolong Siki, the effort was born of Jharkhand's campaign for statehood. “I'd been working on the script since 1989, when I was involved in the student movement,“ he says.
Developed for the Oraon, who number more than 40 lakh across adjacent states, Tolong Siki (a reference to the traditional tribal male attire), was admitted into schools in Jharkhand as a medium of instruction in 2001. From 2009, state government students could write their exams in it though Hindi continued to be the state language. The script mimics tribal routines like their sari drape, bread-making and other cultural practices.
Significantly, the ideological impulses that may have once powered linguistic campaigns such as this could lose steam once political ends are met. As Dr Oraon is discovering. “Even state support of Tolong Siki is dwindling,“ he admits. “It is only taught in a few schools, and it is primarily through schools that a language survives.“ He cites Ol Chiki, the script developed for the Santhalis 91 years ago by Raghunath Murmu, as a success story which, through its initiation in the Eighth Schedule (even gaining an app), has obtained for the Santhalis social and political heft.
Hoping for a similar improvement in fortunes, Dr Oraon and his associates took it upon themselves to promote Tolong Siki. They published primers, launched a website (tolongsiki.com), trained teachers, and started teaching the script in 20 `dhumkurias' or communal dormitories. But the script nonetheless faces an uncertain future as older generations say they can get by without it, and youth believe they need only English and Hindi for a living.
Linguist Dr Mahendra Kumar Mishra weighs the real and perceived benefits of an indigenous script, saying, “Perceived benefits include a consolidation of group identity, ethnic solidarity and political dividends. Literacy too can be promoted. But, it can also promote parochialism.“
In the last two decades, several tribal languages have experimented through invention and synthesis to create their own scripts, says Dr GN Devy , director of Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, in Va dodara. “After Independence, states were created on the basis of language. Languages that didn't have scripts didn't have states. Tribals believe if they publish litera ture, particularly in their own script, someday their identity as citizens will be strongly registered,“ he says.
However, can a language only be saved if it has its own script? If a new script has to pass muster with a sizeable community of potential users, it also has to receive official sanction from the state, and then the Centre, if it aims to be listed in the Eighth Schedule.This will then earn it status and support, including the infrastructure to print, teach and administer in it. But some like Dr Awadesh Kumar Mishra, director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) worry that permitting every linguistic group to create a script of its own can create Babel-like chaos. “You can't invent scripts for all 800 varieties of Indian languages.Jharkhand has 35 languages; imagine if 35 scripts were used to write exams. Who would evaluate them?“ he asks.
