Whenever someone asks me what my first language is, I'm always conflicted for a two main reasons:
1. It's a relatively small dialect that's sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states, owing to medieval migration. It's never on any forms and I would never expect it to be, but it also does not have a distinct name. And even more confusingly, despite it being named the same as one of the aforementioned major languages, I can't speak that one at all, and instead can speak the other.
2. After living abroad as a child and going to schools where English was the primary medium of instruction my entire life (even after moving back to India), I am by far the most fluent in English of the 4 languages I can speak (not all of them fluently). I think in English.
I often find myself sad about the attrition of my mother tongue, especially because I'm noticing it happen more and more not just to me but to my entire generation. I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
You could try contacting your local university's linguistics dept, they might know somebody that knows someone that's interested in documenting the language.
Then, as someone else suggested, I'm sure a university with a thriving linguistics department would love to document your language. I'd imagine a linguistic ethnographer would probably be delighted at the sight of an email with the heading "My language is not documented on Glottolog. Can you help?"
It sounds likely to be a language in the Tamil-Kannada family (as these are the major languages of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka respectively). There were a great number of Vijayanagara-era migrations, but sadly the South Dravidian languages have relatively less comparative linguistic study, so it's hard to say any further.
Yep, exactly. There isn't really a name for the dialect, like I said before. We call it Kannada, but it's not what you would find in Karnataka.
I've tried to do some research, but there's not very much literature and what's there is paywalled. I was even going to email one of the most prominent authors in the field of Vijayanagar-era history and migrations for a copy of her book, but found out that she'd passed away a few years prior, sadly.
Something I'm thinking about with under-resourced languages is that you have to either be OK with an extensive replacement of vocabulary with English/other prestige language's vocabulary, or you need influential nationalists/ideologues devoting a lot of time coining new terms from native roots. We've seen vocabulary get supplanted with English (Norman/Latinate vocab), and these days we see it even in languages as high-resource as Japanese and Korean (English vocab), especially in business. I suppose this happened to your mother tongue as well in the past.
> but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
I think there are two arms to this kind of cultural agenda. One is indeed to document it in the ways it is used by native speakers in the domains of life that its speakers use it in.
The other is more accessible and creative, to reform it by drawing it out of homes and villages and making it a suitable vehicle for conversation in the global intellectual zeitgeist. That means giving standard names to every periodic table element, to Newtonian mechanics, to business concepts, and so on, but also to things like "mobile phone", "ballpoint pen", "gym", "soda". A good starting point can come from translating Wikipedia.
To be frank even a language with as ideological a community of speakers as Hebrew borrows a lot from the English/Latinate vocabulary for modern terms. There may be other examples, but probably the language I know to be most successful in such a project is Standard Written Chinese. It got a headstart with the Japanese forming Sinitic calques as Japan modernized in the Meiji era, but then today the standard practice is to form calques for new terms rather than transliterate, which is quite rare.
I think standardizing scientific terms and the like is a very minor concern when it comes to preserving endangered languages. Most science is done in English anyways, and that's unlikely to change.
I think that depends, many sufficiently large regions do STEM in regional languages. English is just a language for trade - where there are no need for international communication, there can be little reasons to fall back to English.
> I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
LLMs could represent an interesting opportunity not just for linguistic preservation, but also to make smaller languages more relevant to their communities again. This article [0], despite its headline claiming the opposite, contains some examples of researchers training LLMs to that end, and how it's helped them reconnect with their mother tongues and relatives.
1. It's a relatively small dialect that's sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states, owing to medieval migration. It's never on any forms and I would never expect it to be, but it also does not have a distinct name. And even more confusingly, despite it being named the same as one of the aforementioned major languages, I can't speak that one at all, and instead can speak the other.
2. After living abroad as a child and going to schools where English was the primary medium of instruction my entire life (even after moving back to India), I am by far the most fluent in English of the 4 languages I can speak (not all of them fluently). I think in English.
I often find myself sad about the attrition of my mother tongue, especially because I'm noticing it happen more and more not just to me but to my entire generation. I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.