Speaking in Tongues on Languages

The Zonal Official Language Felicitation Function and Colloquium for Eastern & North-Eastern Region was held on Thursday, and Sunday, 27 March, is when the country usually observes the National Regional Languages Day. Both are official efforts at nurturing Hindi, the official language of the Indian Union, and the bouquet of around 22 regional languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution which secures them official language status. The health of the official language of the nation was obviously compromised, because it had to be more than just ultra-nationalism which led to the creation of a Department of Official Language under the Ministry of Home Affairs with the prescribed duty to “speed-up propagation and development of Official Language Hindi and also to accelerate its progressive use for official purposes”. That was in 1975, and the Department keeps busy still, ensuring “compliance” of the Constitutional and legal provisions regarding the official language and to promote the use of Hindi for official purposes of the Union. Frankly speaking, one of the handicaps imposed on the language is governmental involvement, because this ends up straitjacketing the language. For example, in Sikkim, where Hindi is not the lingua franca, everyone still prefers to receive their entertainment in this language, but when comes to offiacialese, the language turns alien. Efforts to promote use of the language, because the responsibility is tasked to a government department, settle down to the convenient tokenism of getting new signboards painted and letterheads incorporating Devanagari printed. This is not to suggest that Hindi-usage should be more imaginatively promoted, because there is much that can be argued against any artificial incorporation of a language, but is highlighted to project how even the regional languages here are being treated.

The observance of a regional languages day might not resuscitate the fate of regional languages and dialects, but in the observance of the day, an opportunity arises to ponder more seriously on where things are going wrong in the efforts at keeping these languages alive. Languages are essentially about communication, they then take on aspects of culture and invariably underline the ethos of a people. That said, a language obviously ceases to be one when there is no one left speaking it. This does not necessarily happen with the annihilation of a people, and is most times caused by the language becoming redundant even as a communication tool. How does a language die? History has shown that apart from loss of functionality, the moment “outsiders” stop trying to learn a language, it is already on death-row. And outsiders stop learning a language when they feel no need for it either as a tool for communication or to enhance their learning. The best examples for the latter scenario are Sanskrit and Latin, which. Even though ‘dead’ in as far as being a communication tool is concerned, they survive because of the wealth that works written in these languages contain. In Sikkim, all older members of the plainsmen business community speak fluent Tibetan. They had to, if they wanted to trade with Tibet. Everyone in Sikkim, including those who have been here barely a year, needs to pick up Nepali now. The Chinese have introduced English [even Hindi] language classes in their schools because they want to now converse with the world.
Now, let’s look at Sikkim. Take the Bhutia or Lepcha languages as examples. One doesn’t see too many non-Bhutias or non-Lepchas wanting to learn the language unless they are involved in some kind of academic research. Very soon, even the families which still use the language will stop doing so, because, as the pool of speakers shrinks, so does the vocabulary, and soon, only the greetings survive with the more complicated conversations taking place in the lingua franca which has come to set. What further dulls the vibrancy of a language is the limited output of literary works. As far as the State government is concerned, it has made it mandatory for all government schools to teach the local languages to anyone interested. What it really should be doing instead is setting aside a budget to fund publications in these languages. The onus of keeping a language alive is essentially that of the native speakers, and if they learn it well enough at home and have a substantial corpus of publications in their language to choose from at book-stores, the language will perhaps throb more vibrantly than it is doing at present, when State patronage is limited to including language classes in schools.