The decline and disappearance of indigenous languages is a global concern which has significant educational, cultural and scientific implications.
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Upasana Bora Sinha
The decline and disappearance of indigenous languages is a global concern which has significant educational, cultural and scientific implications. According to data by the UNESCO, out of the 7000 to 8000 world’s estimated languages, around 40% are facing the possibility of disappearance in the years to come. In this day and age of globalisation and borderless digital socialisation, this data may not seem very relevant. However, any language, especially an indigenous language, is much more than just a means of communication. Indigenous languages, which are mostly of oral tradition, are repositories of knowledge gained through observation, environmental understanding and community-based modes of learning which survive on social memory that have passed over generations.
In a country like India, which is home to a very large number of multilingual societies, for most indigenous communities, languages have functioned as store-houses of ecological practices, medicinal knowledge, agricultural knowledge, understanding of food systems, cultural philosophies and ethics. However, the modern education system, through its recognition of privileged dominant languages as principal mediums of instruction and intellectual legitimacy, has inadvertently landed up marginalising many indigenous languages from the formal learning spaces. As an outcome of this, academic engagement with native linguistic systems is becoming more and more reduced and there is a growing disconnect between knowledge and language. A mother tongue, which can be considered as ‘language of the soul’, through which communities historically interpreted nature, local environments and biodiversities, climate patterns, agricultural and healing practices, are getting forgotten.
It is necessary to understand why indigenous languages matter so much. Diverse research studies emphasise that a language is not merely a tool for communicating information. It is actually an organised system for classification, interpretation and observation which emerge from sustained interaction between communities and specific ecological environments. Communities inhabiting river valleys, mountain ecosystems, forests and other biodiversity-rich regions frequently develop specialised and specific vocabularies related to medicinal plants, food preservation, water management, cultivation practices, soil conditions, animal behaviour, etc. Such vocabularies encode generations of empirical observation and adaptive experimentation.
This rings true for the many parts of Northeast India where oral traditions continue to preserve detailed knowledge associated with biodiversity management, food preservation, understanding local ecological conditions, weather patterns as well as agricultural cycles. In fact, this is a global pattern visible among many indigenous societies which have oral knowledge systems. In all the cases, when languages weaken, the unique knowledge systems also become vulnerable.
However, it is also a fact that neglect of any mother tongue is not always intentional, but rather it is often circumstantial. And here lies the problem with translation. It is often a misconception of the modern education system that scientific and technical knowledge can easily be translated and transferred across languages. While this may be true in case of some major languages, it actually is not applicable to indigenous languages. Indigenous knowledge systems are often deeply embedded within local linguistic and cultural contexts. Traditional medicinal systems, for example, may classify plants not only according to physical appearance, but also through associations involving habitat, seasonal variation, preparation methods, observed therapeutic effects and ecological relationships. Agricultural vocabularies may contain distinctions related to moisture retention, slope orientation, biodiversity indicators, or seed resilience that do not always correspond directly with standardised scientific terminology.
Therefore, even though translations are encouraged and appreciated, translated texts often do not fully preserve the ecological, cultural and semantic nuances embedded within indigenous terminology. A translated archive may preserve fragments of information, but it cannot fully reproduce the conceptual structure of a living language or the social context within which knowledge is transmitted across generations. Relevance of indigenous languages extends much beyond the realms of scientific knowledge systems. Infact, linguistic diversity greatly contributes to intellectual diversity as different languages encode unique and distinct systems of knowledge categorization, environmental interpretation and social understanding.
This educational philosophy has been shared by numerous leaders, educationists and thinkers. Naming a few, Mahatma Gandhi believed that when the medium of instruction is a foreign language, it is intellectually taxing for children and leads to superficial learning. He believed that knowledge of the mother tongue is essential for developing originality, moral character and a sense of pride. Celebrated Kenyan author and literary theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a fierce advocate for African-language literature and a vital voice in post-colonial studies argued that a language carries collective memory and intellectual identity. Similarly, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire maintained that meaningful education must emerge from the linguistic and cultural realities of learners rather than from externally imposed systems detached from lived experience.
Freire’s foundational philosophy, outlined in his seminal work ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, centres on several key concepts regarding the connection between education and lived experience. Professor Temsula Ao’s literary and ethnographic work, such as ‘The Ao Naga Oral Tradition’, emphasises that storytelling is a vital archive of indigenous ecology and biocultural continuity. Her writings warn that when younger generations lose fluency in ancestral languages, they are severed from the intimate ecological wisdom and environmental worldview encoded within those native tongues. These insights acknowledge the fact that educational systems which entirely marginalize indigenous and local languages risk producing generations increasingly disconnected from community memory, ecological knowledge and linguistic heritage.
The central question before modern education systems is often whether indigenous languages should coexist with global languages, and how both can be sustained simultaneously within educational frameworks. With global languages being very important for higher education, scientific collaboration and professional mobility, preservation of indigenous languages often becomes viewed more so as a cultural and community responsibility. In this context the National Education Policy 2020 offers an opportunity to reconsider this imbalance by repositioning indigenous languages not merely as cultural symbols, but as legitimate mediums of knowledge transmission and intellectual engagement.
The significance of the NEP 2020 lies in its recognition that language is not merely a medium of communication, but the foundation through which children perceive, organise and internalise knowledge. In a country as linguistically diverse as India, the policy acknowledges that the erosion of indigenous and regional languages threatens not only cultural identity, but also entire systems of ecological wisdom, medicinal practices, oral histories, artisanal technologies and community-based knowledge accumulated over centuries. By recommending that the medium of instruction, wherever possible, should be the home language, mother tongue or regional language in the formative early and middle school years, the policy aligns itself with decades of educational and cognitive research which has demonstrated that children learn concepts more effectively in familiar linguistic environments. Students educated initially in their mother tongue often display stronger conceptual clarity, improved cognitive development, greater classroom participation and enhanced critical thinking abilities.
At the same time, NEP 2020 does not position multilingualism in opposition to global engagement. Rather, it envisions an educational framework in which strong intellectual foundations rooted in local languages can coexist with national and international linguistic competence. The policy’s broad provisions promote multilingual education, preservation of local educational resources, curricular inclusion of Indian Knowledge Systems, preservation of endangered languages and integration of local knowledge traditions into pedagogy. For indigenous and linguistically diverse communities, these measures create unprecedented opportunities to bring oral traditions, ethnobotanical knowledge, ecological practices and region-specific environmental understanding into formal systems of learning, thereby transforming education into an instrument not only of literacy, but of cultural continuity and knowledge preservation.
NEP 2020 allows easy and practical approaches for the development of multilingual curricular resources, particularly in subjects such as environmental studies, social sciences and the arts. Schools can collaborate with community elders, local scholars and traditional knowledge holders to document oral histories, folk narratives and other oral literature, indigenous agricultural practices, medicinal plant knowledge and local ecological observations, thereby converting community knowledge into educational content. Again, students may undertake projects documenting local knowledge using indigenous nomenclature, interview traditional artisans regarding material technologies, or record oral traditions related to water conservation, weather prediction, sustainable resource management, traditional rituals, etc.
Digital technologies can also play a crucial role through the creation of online repositories, audio archives, community dictionaries and local-language educational applications that preserve endangered linguistic resources, thereby making them accessible to younger generations. NEP 2020 offers an opportunity to move beyond viewing local languages merely as subjects of study and instead position them as living repositories of knowledge thereby creating an education system that simultaneously promotes academic achievement, cultural sustainability, linguistic diversity and the preservation of India’s rich and varied knowledge traditions.
(The author is from Dept of Chemistry, Nagaland University)