Swati Priya1 & Rajni Singh2
1Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT(ISM) Dhanbad. Email: swati.jha@hotmail.com
2Associate Professor of English, IIT(ISM) Dhanbad, India. Email: rajnisingh18@gmail.com.
Volume 10, Number 2, 2018 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n2.17
Received February 09, 2017; Revised March 15, 2018; Accepted April 05, 2018; Published May 07, 2018.
Abstract
Languages are repositories of history, they express identity and contribute to the sum of human knowledge. (David Crystal, 2000). The linguistic diversity is really a benchmark of cultural diversity. Language, knowledge and culture are intricately woven. If a language is lost, the knowledge and cultural aspects of that community becomes extinct. The present study discusses about language death and the factors that leads to the language death in the world and in India. The prime focus of the study is to consider Khortha, a tribal language being spoken in Jharkhand and its neighboring states, as an endangered language. Khortha is fading away and is on the verge of losing its identity, the paper hence discusses some of the preventive measures to revitalize the language and safeguard it from getting extinct. The study has been presented through the data collected from the communities living in the outskirts of Dhanbad and the linguistic variation has been shown based on various parameters.
Keywords: Language death, tribal language, language revitalization, linguistic variation