Connect the Young to Their Language

Editorial:
Today is Bhasa Manyata Diwas. Nineteen years have passed since Nepali was accorded the Constitutional recognition that was its due. After two decades, it is perhaps time that the observance of the day progressed from jubilation to introspection. How has the language progressed from recognition to relevance? How well has the Constitutional recognition for Nepali been leveraged to serve the language and its speakers? The Nepali Sahitya Parishad here has organised a debate on the role [or disservice] of educational institutions in the declining status of Nepali language. It is interesting to note that even the NSP records that the language is in decline, and what will be interesting to watch is the level of debate on the role of educational institutions in the nurture of a language. What is more important though, is to deliberate on how well the opportunities and facilities opened by Constitutional recognition been utilised to promote the language.
Nepali has been the lingua franca of these parts from more than a century now. The hills have contributed some exceptional literary masters in the language and most of them are from the ‘pre-recognition’ times. It continues to be the lingua franca, but is increasingly becoming just that – a communication tool - with very little to offer by way of pan-Indian Nepali writing or reading. The language, it has to be admitted, is at risk of becoming a dialect despite whatever the doyens of the literary circles would have us believe. Those who manage organizations and parishads to look after the affairs of the language have met with very limited success in delivering what is expected of them. In fact, Nepali, as a medium of literary interaction has shrivelled both in scale and scope. At a time when Nepali was still considered a ‘foreign language’ [in the initial decades of the 20th century], it used to have a monthly newspaper, “Gorkha Khabar Kagat,” published from Darjeeling and read by Nepali-reading people stretching from Burma to Dehradun. Two decades since the language was constitutionally recognized by the country as one of its own, there is no publication that links Nepali-speaking pockets across India. Such a publication is not only about sharing information, but also about communicating across geographical limitations. Accentuating the vacuum created by the lack of such a link-publication is the near complete absence of any children’s literature in Nepali. Save the nursery rhymes and the insertions in Nepali text books, there is no independent publishing industry devoted to get the young into the habit of reading Nepali. There is also a felt need for a professionally managed translating industry to make the world’s best children’s literature accessible to Nepali-speaking children in their own language. In an increasingly wired/ connected world, children will access these titles anyway and even struggle with reading them in languages they are not as comfortable with. As more and more of them source their reading material in English, fewer of them will develop reading proficiency [beyond textbooks] in Nepali. The disconnect will continue and as they stop reading, the language will slip into faster decline. Unless people start reading young, the need to read or even the ability to write will diminish aggressively. A few more generations and no one except those with contracts to prepare Nepali textbooks for schools will have any use for writing skills.
Most languages from these parts have already paced their steps into oblivion because they failed to remain relevant. Nepali, given the sheer number of people who speak it and can read it, will take longer to fade, but if the aimlessness of the stewards of the language continues, it will find itself similar threatened in the near future.