USUALLY, when a person speaks a language poorly, it is a sign that they speak some other language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak any language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I, too, have lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, even though I used to think in both Tamil and Malayalam once. It is hard to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongues have died inside us and our children do not know them at all.
Yet, I am unable to mourn a dying language. This is because beyond the nostalgia of heritage, the broad reasons why people mourn the demise of a language are based on false assumptions.
There is a view that every language encodes a unique human emotion or a way of thinking, which cannot be decoded by another language. I want to believe this because I want there to be magic in this world, but from what I have seen, there is nothing emotionally unique about any language, and the lament about dying languages is overstated because we are afraid of death in general.
Laura Spinney, whose latest book is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, told theIndian Express recently that, “A quarter of living languages will die.” This would have brought a familiar ache to many of us. The same ache we feel when we are made to hear the sounds of the last person to have spoken a language, inevitably a poor tribal person in some remote place, or the last songs of an extinct bird, sounds that filled the forests for millions of years that vanished, never to return.
The death of a language is not a trifling matter. Millions of people, for thousands of years, once loved, fought and figured stuff out in it. Then, a generation began to abandon it, or simply became another sort of people. So the modern people try to “preserve” it.
Our age is defined by preservation; every dying thing must be preserved. But the true heritage of a place is made up of the things that intellectuals do not try to save, but which survive anyway—paradisiacal food, mainstream music, the clothes of a bride, even daily-wear. What goes is usually the insignia of the old elite, also known as culture, or what the masses can afford to let go.
A language always dies of natural causes, because it has been forsaken by its people for a more useful language. (People who want South India to adopt Hindi don’t seem to get this—for many in this region, Hindi is useless.)
A powerful reason why people want to preserve a language is the assumption that every language contains a way of thinking, or human feelings that are unique to it. This has spawned some esoteric overreach. Thus, we are told of an African tribe (it’s always an African tribe) that refers to the future as behind it and the past as ahead of it. And we are supposed to marvel at some secret the tribe knew. But there is nothing more to it. Just as there is nothing to the fact that Hindi has the same word for tomorrow and yesterday.
Some naive Anglicized writers try to see too much philosophy in what is just an etymological accident. Maybe some incompetent pundit made an error and it stuck. There is this famous view that the Inuit people of the Arctic region have hundreds of words for snow because they can see many aspects of it. That’s not true. It is just that the Inuit languages are poly-synthetic, so they can make up long strings of words, like ‘lightly falling snow.’
In her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions, the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita cites words in several languages to build the argument that emotions are not entirely innate, that they are cultural artefacts, recorded in and even arising from local languages. Inevitably, Japanese comes up often. She says that the Japanese word amae, which means ‘a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver,’ has no English equivalent. And that the Samoan word alofa, which encompasses love, sympathy and pity among other emotions, does not have an English parallel.
Mesquita makes too much of such words. That we fully grasp the meaning of the foreign words she lists indicates that we know the feeling, just that we need many words to express the same feeling. For instance, ‘a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver.’
In fact, the most useless aspect of English is that it has many words that represent elaborate feelings, but these are not widely known. Etymologist Susie Dent frequently posts such words on the social media platform X—the kind that would be marked red in your Word file. Like ‘beek,’ which means to bask in the pleasurable warmth of the sun, and ‘apricate,’ which means to sunbathe. Surely, these words don’t mean anything unique to the British, especially as they never saw much of the sun even in ancient times.
What about ‘jihad,’ a word that seems to contain an idea of war against infidels? The word simply means ‘struggle’ in Arabic. Everything else about it is a metaphorical application and nothing about the word or its emotion is unique to Arabs.
If there is a word that denotes an emotion or a way of thinking that only speakers of that language can achieve, please let this writer know. Like I said, I want there to be magic.
(Stay and read other pieces.)