Why do languages die?

Since a politician never believes what he says, Charles de Gaulle reasoned, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word. Mulayam Singh Yadav is old school. Craftiest of the lot, not for nothing does he enjoy the distinction of ruling India’s most populous state for three terms. A fourth one was generously passed over in favor of his young and green son.
Now Mulayam seldom says or does something without a considered motive underpinning it. His fixation with Hindi and fulminations against English, however, are a recurring phenomenon. Like a bored child, he sends up this balloon about throwing out the Queen’s language and promoting rashtra bhasha (national language) from time to time. Which for most South Indians is nothing short of a call to arms.
Let’s not forget that Tamils not long ago threatened to cede from India over the imposition of Hindi. A similar approach to language split Pakistan, a nation founded in the name of faith. Emotions and languages go together.
Now despite coming from a tribe that depends critically on the English language to keep the wolf from the door, I have no qualms in saying that Macaulay’s gift may have been directly or indirectly responsible for the decline and in some cases total decimation of hundreds of rich languages and cultures around the world.
Great ancient languages like Arabic, Persian, Latin, Greek and even the traditional rival next door, French, find themselves increasingly overwhelmed by the all-conquering power of the language from the tiny island known for its unwelcoming weather.
If this is the predicament of powerful languages with hundreds of millions of speakers, you can imagine the fate of tongues and dialects that are less fortunate. With no state patronage or loyalty of their followers, they are doomed.
Language is perhaps one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind. The first word revealed to the Prophet, peace be upon him, was Iqra (read). Spoken or written word is what distinguishes us from animals. Languages are the collective heritage and property of mankind. They belong to us all.
A language is not merely a language. It spawns a whole culture and its own distinct values, etiquettes and mores. A whole way of life grows and evolves around it. It defines our identity and in some cases, as in secular Europe, linguistic identity is more important than a religious one.
This is why it is a human tragedy when a language quietly dies, for whatever reason. Languages are dying fast. According to Unesco, a language dies every 14 days somewhere on the planet. And if nothing is done, the world body warns, half of 6,000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century.
“With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages,” says Unesco.
Not surprisingly, most of these endangered languages are in the developing world. Rapid globalization and, above all, the total ascendancy and hegemony of the West and Western civilization in the past few centuries have brought the English language complete and brute global supremacy. Like it or not, it has become the global lingua franca — a language the world does business in.
And this global order is unlikely to change in foreseeable future. Of course, English is a splendid and versatile language and has helped brought cultures and nations together. But must its success and glory come at the expense of other equally great languages and cultures?
Being a student and practitioner of the language, I love English. I love it, not just because I love my Shakespeare, Shelly, Keats, Frost, Dickens, Jane Austen and Hemingway but also because after all these years of association with it, I find myself at home with the language. And this is the case with most people of my generation and those who came later. Above all, it has helped people like me who come from a humble ‘Urdu background’ reach a global audience.
M.J. Akbar, who has virtually reinvented Indian journalism, insists on calling English just “another Indian” language. India may be the largest English-speaking nation today. Shashi Tharoor and sociologist Dipkankar Gupta would agree.
And so would hundreds of millions of young Indians enrolled in the so-called English medium schools across the country where proficiency in English is seen as an essential ticket and passport to prosperity and perhaps a better life abroad.
What would Mulayam tell those aspiring multitudes, whose numbers are perhaps even greater in UP, India’s largest state in terms of population? Moved by his frequent sermons about embracing Hindi and banishing English, they are hardly likely to move their children to Hindi vidyalayas (schools).
Especially when both his sons somehow managed to go to Australian and British universities where the last I heard they hadn’t switched to our “rashtriya bhasha.” If this isn’t hypocrisy, what is? But then who takes politicians seriously!
I have nothing against Hindi. If it weren’t for the heavy dose of Sanskrit that is forced down one’s throat by Doordarshan and in all officialese in the name of Hindi, it is a sweet language. Urdu and Hindi are inextricably linked to each other, thanks to their shared Indo-Aryan base and “khari boli” heritage. They indeed sound like twins, the only distinguishing difference being the script. This is why at the height of the raging Hindi-Urdu row before Independence, Gandhi ingeniously came up with the term called Hindustani to cool tempers on both sides.
Be that as it may, it is rather strange that after spending of hundreds of billions of rupees in concerted campaigns by successive governments all these years to promote and push Hindi, Mulayam and other champions of Hindi should be concerned about its future. In fact, if anything, the promotion of Hindi has been done at the expense of all other languages.
If any language really faces an existential crisis today, it is Urdu, the eclectic language that came into being following the encounter between Arab, Persian and Central Asian Muslims and India. Heavily drawn from Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages because they formed the linguistic roots of new arrivals, Urdu is essentially Indian in spirit and character because its base of khari boli, Hindi, Prakrit and Sanskrit is rooted in this land.
The result is a language that for centuries served as lingua franca of Mughal India and still does, widely understood and spoken as it is across the length and breadth of the country. After being elbowed out as the language of power and courts — and from virtually everywhere else — Bollywood ostensibly remains its last bastion; an industry once ironically looked down upon by good Muslims.
Urdu is slowly dying in India today. Starved of state support and weighed down by the apathy of its own speakers, it is systematically being smothered and squeezed out from across the country. Do not let all those frequent and mediocre mushairas fool you.
Urdu is in dire straits in the land of its birth. In Pakistan, I understand, things aren’t any better either although the language enjoys the state patronage. A young Pakistani blogger recently bemoaned the fact that most young Pakistanis today see Urdu as the “language of servants” and naturally turn to English to express themselves.
Ludmila Vasilieva, the Russian translator of Faiz, recently pointed out that while she often sees Indian officials speak in Hindi even in an international setting, Pakistanis fastidiously stick to the language that Mulayam insists belongs to the empire.
As authors of the latest Unesco report on endangered languages note, “a language is endangered when parents are no longer teaching it to their children and it is no longer being used in everyday life.”
So the future of our language is in our own hands. The Jews kept Hebrew alive in the face of great adversity and exile of more than 2,000 years. It would take far less to keep ours alive.

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