"The Challenges of the Twenty-first Century World in the Language Classrooms" by Prof. Gabriela Nik Ilieva, Clinical Professor of South Asian Studies, New York University

Professor Gabriela Nik Ilieva delivering lecture 

Language of Advertising Media and Market (LAMM) has organised a Guest Lecture by Prof. Gabriela Nik Ilieva, Clinical Professor of South Asian Studies, New York University, was recently awarded George Grearson Award for promoting Hindi language by the President of India. The programme started with the recitation of the verses from the Holy Quran followed by a welcome address by Dr. Mohammad Jahangeer Warsi (Co-ordinator LAMM). After this bouquets were presented to the guests Prof. Gabriela Nik Ilieva, Prof. Melina, Prof. Mohammad Zahid (Dean, Faculty of Arts), Prof. Javaid Akhter (Registrar AMU). Prof. Gabriela Nik Ilieva delivered her lecture on the topic- The Challenges of Twenty-first Century World in the Language Classrooms.

In her lecture, she threw light on the various aspects of challenges in the language classrooms. She pointed out that we are living in a world of globalized economies, a world of global connectivity through extensive combination of real and virtual communication and travel, a world characterized by information overflow by globalized news and entertainment. It is certainly obvious and indeed has already started that education takes into account these new frameworks of realities and introduces alternations in its strategies and syllabi to train students in updated content areas as well as in new 21st century skills.

Prof. Gabriela rightly mentioned that over the last ten years, smartphones have gone from something that students had as a minor distraction, to something that runs their entire social lives and even create their individual Online Identity, both inside and outside of classroom. At this juncture, we can’t simply disallow smartphones inside the classrooms. Managing mobile phone use in the classroom is important for the learning experience of all the students; but there must be certain controlled ways for managing mobile phone use in the classroom situation.

She mentioned that language classrooms are more open in nature. We can discuss almost anything and everything here in comparison to other disciplines, for instance, Economy, where we can’t go much beyond the topic. And, India is fortunate for having a complex culture. The kind of tolerance for variety exists here. Prof. Gabriela also pointed out that in India the major failures of foreign NGO’s are due to that lack of understanding about the culture of the people. We can’t simply understand the culture of a community from their products, from superficial level; culture lies inside, in the languages, in their believe systems. For understanding the students we need to be aware about their cultures.  

She interestingly raised the question, ‘whose challenge is it, for teachers or for students?’ She was with the view that it is the challenge of the teachers because, teachers are not media-literate and they need to cope up with the changing scenario of the time.     

Prof. Gabriela concluded that we need flipped classrooms where teacher will not going to teach inside the classrooms but before entering into the class we want students to involve in understanding the topic from their own initiative. They need to know the real task from the real world. Certainly, the instructions from teachers are needed but over-correction reduced self-confidence of students.

Addressing to a question in the Question-Answer session, Prof. Gabriela said that India is the land of multi-ethnicity and multi-languages where no scripts are required, here what we need is symbol. Symbol is needed because India is the land of diversity. History witnessed, from Harappa to Mohenjodaro everywhere you will find symbols, representing its rich diversity. And, it is our responsibility to use this richness of diversity in language classrooms. When we have lesser cultural variety we talk about differences but when we have greater cultural variety we talk about similarities and that is the way creates an ideal situation for a language classroom. The programme ended with the concluding remarks from Dr. Bairam Khan. 

Group Photo: Prof. Gabriela Nik Ilieva with Prof. Prof. Ali R Fatihi ( Chairman), Prof. S. Imtiaz Hasnain, Dr. Abdul Aziz Khan, Dr. Nazrin B. Laskar, Prof. Shabana Hameed, Dr. M. J. Warsi, Dr. Bairam Khan, Dr. Sadia Hasan, Dr. Sabahuddin Ahmad, Dr. Pallav Vishnu and students of the Department. 

Copyright © 2017 by Masud Husain Khan Linguistic Society. All rights reserved.

The Language Without Speech: Sign Language

Indian Sign Language Alphabet, 

Human beings cannot stop talking. All we want is the communication with our fellow human beings. As we have seen, Children are bio-programmed to acquire a language and without any instruction based direct teaching they easily can speak and understand the language quite naturally while they are very young. In fact, any normal child can acquire even extremely intricate grammatical rules within  4-5years without much difficulty.

The way normal child acquire the natural language, in the same way the deaf child also acquire the language, we called Sign language. In later life, they become so habituated with the sign language that even in sleep they talk in Sign Language. There are approximately 70 million deaf people in the world who use sign language as their “mother tongue” or first language.

Sign language provides a full-fledged system of communication to the signer. Acquisition of sign language can be explained with the notion of “Critical Period (CP)” (Eric Heinz Lenneberg: 1967). The research of Newport (1990) and many other research scholars show that the exposure of sign language is very effective at early age in order to completely acquire the language. It has been observed that after 13years of age when the sign language introduced to a deaf child then there would be a greater degree of difference from the grammar of deaf children exposed to sign language from birth.

Deaf children naturally acquire the sign language from their deaf parents. For the case of deaf children of normal parents, they develop their own sign language. There is no uniform sign language in the world. Each community of sign language user develop their own version.

Human ability to create a „brand-new‟ language we have seen in “Plantation Creole” though they share features of Superstrate and Substrate languages. A prominent example of creolisation in sign language is Nicaraguan Sign language. During the formation of Nicaraguan Sign language, deaf children were brought together in the 1980s in a school in Nicaraguan who had no exposure to any language. Those children quickly developed a pidgin sign language but at the first phase they were not capable of providing the entire communication need of a human. But in course of time it became more complex for fulfilling the required need. In this case, Nicaraguan Sign language emerged from human contact but not language contact. Along with other sign languages it has the capacity of expressing human feeling like other natural languages.

But still, Sign languages are considered merely as a gesture and not as a natural language, the picture is more so in India. The struggle for the right of Indian Sign language and its promotion is a recent phenomenon. Although there are 5 million deaf people in India who use Indian Sign Language (ISL). We have no solid evidence about the history and development of Indian Sign Language but safely we can assume that varieties of ISL evolved in schools for the deaf during the end of the nineteenth century.

Deaf people who use sign language are not stupid and they are not backward in any way. Lack of interest in Deaf issue and sign languages are very prominent in the policy making. In the syllabus of Special Education in Hearing Impairment (B.Ed.) negligible proportion of course are prescribed for Indian Sign Language (Only 3 per cent). The sign languages are different from spoken language in term of modality only.

In India Prof. Ulrike Zeshan (Director, International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies) has established that ISL is a proper language bearing all the features of language and this is a natural language for Indian deaf people. Although it has a legally recognition as a language in India still Indian Sign Language is not allowed in most of the Indian schools and discouraged by the policy makers.

Being the citizen of India, ISL users also have equal right to exercise their civil as well as linguistic rights. They also have their opinion on “Make in India” and they have the right to use sign language in all areas of life.

UN Convention of Rights for Persons with Disabilities, for achieving empowerment and insertion of persons with disabilities, should also be implemented in India. The cost of exclusion of people with disability from the workforce is 3-7 per cent of the GDP. So it is the high time to promote ISL at least for the sake of our Indian economy.

Deaf people in India face systematic inequalities. Many of these inequalities have their roots in the lack of understanding of the special linguistic and cultural traditions of Indian Deaf communities. That lack of understanding comes from government policies, administration and academics. Research is not merely of great academic interest, it is an urgent social need, a prerequisite to the development of better policies and practices, and a silver lining towards greater empowerment.

Copyright © 2017 by Masud Husain Khan Linguistic Society. All rights reserved.

Vanishing Language Isolate of India: Nihali

Under the scheme “Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages of India” the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) is working on preservation, protection and documentation of all the languages of India which are spoken by less than ten thousand speakers. One of such language, Nihali, exists in Buldhana district and around the village of Tembi near Tapti river on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border. As per UNESCO report this language has been declared as the Critically Endangered Language in 2014.

But this language became the matter of attraction for linguists when Franciscus Kuiper (1956) first suggested that probably Nihali is unrelated to any other languages of the world.  On the origin of Nihali words, Kuiper had argued that Nihali lexicon consists of cognates from Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages of the sub-continent.

On the other hand, some researchers have linked Nihali to other languages such as Nostratic (Dolgopolsky, 1996) Kusunda, a language spoken in Nepal (Fleming, 1996), and Ainu spoken in Japan (Bengton, 1996). Nihali speakers as well as the entire ethnic group call themselves kalʈo and their speech kalʈo manɖi.

Typically, the minority language in such an arrangement would lose ground to the majority language and in time die out. Spoken by some 2,500 villagers on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border, the language is on the verge of extinction as speakers shifting their language into Korku-Marathi or Hindi to find work, and marrying with other communities.

Prof. Shailendra Mohan, Head of Department, Pune’s Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute began his research on language’s origins, digging at its roots. He was also awarded a grant from the Endangered Languages Project (ELP) by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, for attempting the first documentation of Nihali in 2013.

Prof. Mohan soon discovered that Nihali speakers have their own version of Panchatantra or fable even their understanding of history and mythology was so different from that of the others. They sing songs of Ramayana but at the same time worship Ravana as their hero.

The documentation programmes inculcated sensitivity towards their language and now they realized that their language is special as well as the number of the speakers are very less. Very interestingly, present day Nihali speakers use 60-70% of lexical items from its neighbouring languages but the core vocabulary is really unique in itself.

Nihali shows three-way distinction of number i.e singular, dual and plural. Singular nouns are unmarked, dual and plural are marked by [-iʈkel] and [- ʈa] in Nihali. Numerals used in Nihali are not related to any other langugaes. 

Although it has been also hypothesized that Nihali may be related to Austro-Asiatic languages (Pinnow, 1963, Mundalay, 1996). Kuiper opined that the differences might be argot (code words used among the criminals). Whatever be its antiquity it is our responsibility to save this unique semiotic system (Nihali language) of understanding the world. 

Copyright © 2017 by Masud Husain Khan Linguistic Society. All rights reserved.