Mothertongue

There are something like over 6,000 languages in the world. Asia alone has over 2,200 languages. Indonesia has the most with 742 languages, India has 427, China 241, Philippines 180, Malaysia has 147, most of them in the two Borneo states, and even tiny Brunei has 19 languages.

Like anything else in this world, if we don’t look after them they will soon disappear . This century is an age of rapid change . Like the loss of biodiversity, languages are also disappearing fast. It is believed that as high as 50% of the total world’s languages are dying, 40% are endangered and only 10% are considered “safe”.

With the death of a language, the accumulated knowledge, the understanding of human thought and world view is gone forever. We have a saying that “language is the soul of a race”, this shows how important languages are to people in shaping up their identity and in telling the world who they are. Once the language disappears, the history of the particular people goes with it. Efforts must,therefore, be made to save languages especially minority languages from extinction.

It was reported that the first SJK Kadazandusun in Sabah is to be set up at Kampung Tiong Monggis in Tenghilan some 70 kilometers from Kota Kinabalu, the news should make local language- cultural activists happy. Kadazandusun language, which is part of the larger Austronesian family, is one of the hardest languages to master, many with Kadazandusun blood in them can’t speak the language well or not at all. One of the reasons is that there are too many dialects, though attempts have been made to standardise the language, many especially among the young people find it easier to communicate in Bahasa Malaysia or English.

With the setting up of the $150,000 school occupying a 10-acre site, it is envisaged that at least the Kadazandusun language will be preserved and practised by the young people. However, much work needs to be done, reference materials, guidelines on writing and speaking will have to be produced first and fast.The hardware will be ready soon, but, as usual the hardest part is the software.

What I don’t quite understand is why the school is being sponsored through Korea Food for the Hungry International Fund under the United Nations programme? Why didn’t local bodies who believe in cultural preservations start the project on their own? I am sure there are many affluent members of the community who are willing to help a worthy cause such as this. Don’t we believe in self-help? Why must we rely on external subsidy to keep our own heritage from being zapped away?

Still, this is the start of something good before the rapid march of globalisation swallows everything up in its path. What about the many more native tongues like Bajau, Murut, Iranun, Banjar, Brunei, Tidung and others? Is it going to be all right when we make up one morning and see these languages just disappear into thin air, a footnote in history? Must we again wait for outside help before we do something? The choice is ours.