Indigenous languages in southern Africa face extinction if urgent and serious efforts are not made to develop them and raise their status.

A report, tabled recently at an international conference in Kenya, warned that thousands of indigenous languages in the world might disappear in the next century. The conference was sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Languages are arbitrary oral symbols by which a social group interacts, communicates and self-expresses. It enshrines the culture, customs and secrets of the people.

The report estimates that up to 90 percent of the world's languages could die this century, with the valuable knowledge, culture and customs embedded in them gone forever.

The traditional knowledge at threat includes secrets of how to manage habitats and the land in environmentally sustainable ways passed down by word of mouth over many generations.

Studies carried out estimate that there are 5,000 to 7,000 spoken languages in the world, of which 4,000 to 5,000 are classified as minority languages.

More than 2,500 of these are in immediate danger of extinction and many more are already losing their natural link, 32 percent of these being African.

While 234 have already suffered this fate among which are the Khoi-San languages that were spoken in southern Africa in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

In addition to the Khoi-San languages, Chikunda and Dema in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia are also in danger of extinction.

Globalization has been singled out as the major catalyst in their disappearance. The process of turning the world into a village is promoting the use of English, French and Portuguese and other European languages at the expense of indigenous languages.

"Nature's secrets, locked away in the different indigenous languages may be lost forever as a result of growing globalization," says the report.

English, French and Portuguese are not new to Africa as they are the languages of the former colonial masters. They have been used widely as languages for social mobility and economic interaction, while they are spoken by less than 20 percent of the indigenous population.

In addition to the colonial reason, African states have opted to retain the use of the languages as a unifying force among their diverse language groups.

While the disappearance of the languages is imminent, language experts have called for regional governments to put in place policies that ensure the development and constant use of minority languages.

"For a language to survive it must be used for a wide range of functions otherwise it begins to wither and die. Thus, where we have allowed higher status functions to be limited to English, French and Portuguese only, other languages then begin to wither and die," said Nkosana Sibuyi in an article (who is she?) Most African countries are multilingual with many minority languages spoken -- the DRC has more than 200 languages, Tanzania 120, Angola 63, Mozambique 25 while Botswana and Zimbabwe have about 20 languages each.

However, most of the southern African countries have not put in place deliberate policies that promote and elevate minority languages to protect them from their imminent extinction.

South Africa is one SADC country that adopted in 1996 a multilingual policy, that elevated nine African languages namely Ndebele, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho Siswati, Seswana, Xitsonga and Tshivenda to official languages.

Other countries have through their education acts attempted to elevate indigenous languages to a status recognizable for their development.

Zimbabwe adopted an education policy that stipulates that the first three years of education should use indigenous languages as a medium of instruction while English is being introduced to the student. Seven languages -- Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, Tonga, Venda, Shangani and Nambya enjoy this status.

However countries like Botswana seem to have taken a more radical approach that only recognises one African language, Tswana. Article 60 (d) of the Constitution and the constitutional articles 77, 78 and 79 effectively declare Botswana as a country with one African language. This has come under-fire from other African language speakers like the Kalanga who call for the recognition of their own language.

UNESCO has also committed itself through a declaration to work towards the preservation of languages that are on the verge of disappearance.

"As the disappearance of any language constitutes an irretrievable loss to mankind, it is for UNESCO a task of great urgency to respond to this situation by promoting and if possible, sponsoring programmes of linguistic organisation," reads the UNESCO Declaration. (SARDC)