PATNA: The two-day international conference on “Language, culture, cognition: viability of languages” organized by the Centre for Endangered Language Studies (CELS), School of Social Sciences and Humanities, IIT Patna, ended on Tuesday with a call for preservation of endangered languages of the country.
It also emphasized the need of creating awareness about the significance of the relationship between language and culture in shaping human cognition.
The objective of the conference was aligned with the various provisions of the National Education Policy, 2020 and it discussed ways and means for launching initiatives for development of all spoken and written languages in the country and outside. Altogether 45 research papers were presented and more than 100 scholars from India and abroad participated in the conference.
Addressing the conference as the chief guest, Prof Christopher Sinha of the University of East Anglia, England, spoke about intercultural relations between different societies and consequent development of various languages of the world. Tracing his own roots to Bihar, Sinha gave details of the development of languages both in India and the US over the years. He advocated for protection to some old languages facing extinction.
The chairman of Centre for Scientific and Technical Terminology, and professor of computational linguistics, JNU, Girish Nath Jha, who was the keynote speaker of the conference, urged the academia to work in tandem in the domain of computational linguistics for the enrichment of languages.
Vikram S Sirola of IIT Bombay stressed the need for having an interdisciplinary approach for analysing the effects of language on cognition.
Earlier, IIT Patna director T N Singh emphasized the need of using mother tongue in everyday use in spite of mainstream linguistic marginalization, especially in metropolitan city in recent times. Conference conveners Nalin Bharti and Smriti Singh welcomed the participants and said similar such conferences would be organized by CELS in future.
CELS coordinator Sweta Sinha observed that there is an increasing tendency among the native speakers in Bihar to hide their linguistic identity which is leading to the disappearance of various regional languages.
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