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LANGUAGE defines our identity and shapes our thinking, communication and intellectual development in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Noam Chomsky achieved fame as a young linguist through his theory that all languages are underpinned by a “universal structure”, but this idea of a common linguistic link has since been questioned and debunked. However, the importance of language to individual, group and national identity can hardly be doubted.
So out of the 6,000 or so known languages around the world, why are we losing one every two weeks? Jacob Mikanowski writes in The Guardian: “Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century.”
What is causing this rapid and alarming extinction? For one, small tribes who have lived in remote areas have been driven to the wall by the encroachment of so-called civilisation. From Brazil to Australia, greedy developers and ranchers have grabbed land from indigenous people, killing untold thousands in the process. As these unfortunate tribes struggle for survival, their children are forced to go to “modern” schools out of economic or legal compulsion. More often than not, they lose touch with their own culture.
In Sri Lanka, for example, the Veddas pre-date the arrival of the Sinhalese from India, and inhabit the forest zone. Originally hunter-gatherers, they have been pushed to the margins and are now threatened with extinction. Few of them now speak their ancient language, and the few who are left now entertain outsiders by enacting their old rituals. This pattern is being repeated around the world.
But it’s not just tribal tongues that are being impacted by the times: English is acting as a steamroller that is invading the linguistic landscape of the world. For the last couple of centuries, it acted as a sponge that absorbed words, phrases and expressions from other languages as the British invaded colonised and colonised large parts of the globe. Their civil servants, soldiers and priests penetrated the furthest reaches of the known world in their quest for markets, colonies and converts. To communicate with the people they ruled and traded with, they absorbed local languages, often producing a kind of pidgin English. Thousands of words from such hybrid tongues are now present in the English we use today, making it easily the richest language in the world.
But it did not attain the hegemony it enjoys today until the Americans became a world power in the 20th century. As American aid, movies, music and art flooded the world, the English language became indispensible to access this vast stream of popular culture and goods. The educated younger generation in much of the world today aspires to tap into this American-driven language of the young.
Then, in the last decade of the 20th century, the internet came along, changing our world forever. This, too, was largely an American construct, and in its early days, a knowledge of English was needed to access it. Now, of course, you can communicate in most languages, but English remains the medium that rules cyberspace.
Countries like France and Israel have tried to prevent the invasion of their proud and ancient languages by legislation and rules, but the young adopt their own hip and cool vocabulary. This, of course, includes the latest expressions from London to Los Angeles. Thus, even highly developed and evolved languages are feeling the colonising effect of English.
But before we get nationalistic about this ongoing erosion of our linguistic heritage because of the inroads English is making, let us not forget that since the dawn of time, this is how languages have evolved. Conquest, wars and the movement of people have combined to change the way we live, think and speak. When nomadic tribes from Central Asia began their historic westward migration centuries ago, they ejected the people who lived in their path until there was a further wave of migration driving Middle European tribes all the way to England. As these people moved further and further West, their languages absorbed words they encountered on the way, changing them irrevocably.
We have an example of such a linguistic evolution in Urdu. The word for our language comes from the Turkish root “ordu”, which describes the great cavalry armies that once swept out of Central Asia. It is also the root for the English “horde”. But Urdu developed as a camp language that allowed mercenaries from Turkey, Iran, the Middle East and India to communicate with each other. Words and syntax from these regions found a melting pot in this new, hybrid language, and soon, it developed a grammar and literature of its own. Now, of course, it is being subjected to distortion and invasion by English. We now routinely mix Urdu and English as we speak.
So should we be concerned by the bastardisation of Urdu? The fact is that whether we like it or not, English is now the principle language of commerce, science and the arts. For young people who wish to get ahead in life, it is indispensible. The reality is that Urdu, like so many other languages, has not been able to become the global medium of communication in the way English has become. Even languages like French — once the international lingua franca — has fallen by the wayside, even though it is still used extensively in the old French colonies. But even there, the young are switching to English.
Driven by the compulsions of business, art and style, English is toppling other languages at a rapid rate, destroying the cultural heritage of large numbers of people. Soon, only experts will be able to decipher documents from our past, much as modern Turks can no longer read books published in the Ottoman era.
Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2018
