By Fr Myron J Pereira
One of the most sensitive issues in the world today is religious identity. Language comes a close second.
As societies break up and get fragmented in our post-modern world, language confers an irreplaceable sense of belonging. To speak a significant language well, to understand it, and to write it gracefully gives us a sense of our place in the world.
Perhaps this accounts for the unique role of English in the world today, and why everyone wants to learn it as a second language.
Conversely, to be a migrant or a refugee is not to have a place of one’s own because one doesn’t have a language that matters.
Migrants are made fun of because “they look funny and smell awful, and one can’t make head or tail of what they are saying.”
In many parts of the world, therefore, language is politicized. Going through the papers recently I was struck by how similar reactions are everywhere.
For example: speaking on TV recently, the French Minister of Culture feared that within fifty years, France would have a “tribal” linguistic culture: executives would speak English, immigrants Arabic, and ordinary people the American language of television.
In between, the only people speaking French — a shrinking island, I guess — would be teachers, professors and intellectuals.
This reminds one of the historical anecdote attributed to the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles V: He spoke, so it was said, “Latin to God, French to his ladies, Spanish to his courtiers, and German to his vassals.”
A friend once expressed this picturesquely to me when he said, “I speak many half-languages. It depends which half of me is speaking to which half of you!”
Actually, all of us use many languages and sub-languages most of the time — slang, argot, jargon and technicalese. For language is not just about communication. It is also about power and control.
How language controls
What is the first thing you would do if you were to rule a country? Confucius was asked. The sage replied: Reform the language.
For language is a tool of political power. If the limits of language are the limits of one’s world, why then to control another’s world all one needs to do is sabotage the language. Or impede access to its learning.
In ancient India, for instance, women and Dalits dared not learn Sanskrit. Even to attempt to breach this literary bar — to “read the Vedas” — was to invite horrible torture and even death. This makes the achievement of a woman like Indian Christian social reformer and Bible translator Pandita Ramabai even more astonishing.
And until a few years ago white South Africa prohibited the “Bantu” from learning English. Afrikaans was enough for them.
Thus, throughout the ages, Sanskrit was the language of court and culture (Sanskriti, the very word means “culture”), a male enclave, and the Prakrits (once again, the word means “natural”), restricted to women, children, slaves and barbarians.
In the medieval period, it was Farsi (Persian) which was the channel of literature, poetry and government records, while Urdu (Hindavi, Hindustani) was the pidgin of the military camp, the bazaar and the countryside.
In time, it’s English that has become the imperial international language today, while the regional languages — scholars call them the bhashas (languages) — have subaltern status.
But even the bhashas lord it over the tribal and local languages, often denying them an independent script. Marathi overrules Warli, Bhili, and Kokani; Gujarati does the same for Gamit, Vasava, and Garasiya, etc.; and a heavily Sanskritized Hindi (assisted by the state media) dominates Maithili, Magahi, Braj and Bhojpuri.
This is the two-tier system in operation: one, the imperial language, the medium of cultured and official discourse, spoken and written by men in public places; and the other, the domestic language, usually an unscripted vernacular (lit. “of the slaves”), spoken by women, children and illiterates, a dialect to be used in the kitchen, the bazaar and the brothel.
The missionary contribution
The very significant contribution of the Christian missionaries in India was precisely this. They classified, categorized, and imprinted the regional languages through their dictionaries, grammars and translations, and most definitely through the typographic form in their printing presses.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the Jesuits who brought the first printing press to Goa in 1556, and to the Serampore Baptists who cast the first Indian types, Bengali, in 1800.
Until this “reformation,” language learning was only the privilege of a few propertied males.
Today television and the computer complete the reformation.
Through the last seven decades of independent India, it never really suited the interests of the feudal elite who run this country to invest in regional languages and develop them as channels of scientific and popular communication.
This is one reason for the failure of public education almost everywhere.
But where the government has been slow to reform the language, television has been swift. It has opened vistas of imagination for the deprived and given us more “practical democracy” than a thousand blackboard lectures.
Television is the invader of our private space, the new immigrant, the barbarian within the city walls, and few can resist its linguistic allure.
So, when we grumble about what TV is doing to our language and our morals, what we’re really nervous about is that we’re losing control. – UCA News
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
