I was talking to my grandmother the other day, and she said something strange to me. “Most of the languages of India are going to disappear. They have no value in the present day.” 

 

At first, my dad and I thought that this assertion was over-dramatic and frankly a little dumb. To illustrate what we were thinking, let’s take my grandmother’s own native language, Telugu. It is spoken by over 94 million people in the two Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, bigger than the populations of countries like the UK and Germany, and even more people worldwide. Every year, countless books, movies, and TV shows are made in it, and it is the dominant language of news and politics. Telugu pervades everyday life in those two states, being a common home and street language. Most people in those two states speak Telugu only, with no knowledge of English or other languages. It’s abundantly clear that Telugu does have value. With such a robust foundation as this, my dad and I thought, how could Telugu disappear?

To answer that question, first, we have to consider what it means for a language to die and how it dies. 

A language becomes extinct when there is no one left who can speak it fluently. We can rephrase that as a language dies when speakers don’t pass on the language to the next generation. If native speakers decide not to pass on the language to their kids, the language will die with them. This is not like when people say Latin is a dead language because Latin just slowly morphed into French, Italian, Spanish, etc. through the regular processes of language change. This is when the speakers of a language decide to not speak the language to their children. 

However, not passing on one’s language isn’t very natural. For example, most native English speakers raising kids in America wouldn’t even think twice but to speak English to their child. Similarly, it’s everyone’s instinct to speak with their child in their native language. This means that just like physics, where inertia is broken by an outside force, languages die due to an outside force as well. 

While sometimes, outside forces could be dramatic, such as genocide or natural disaster, most deaths occur gradually. An example is Irish. Looking at Irish, many smaller forces in the 18th and 19th centuries added together over the years to create the situation today, where Irish is classified as Definitely Endangered. A few among them are the British administration favoring English over Irish, the Catholic Church favoring English over Irish, and mass migrations due to the Potato Famine. Over a few hundred years, Irish speakers started learning English, maintaining bilingualism for a few generations and then switched to English only. Only around 100,000 native speakers are left, all of them bilingual.

Going back to Telugu, it doesn’t seem like any of the above factors apply. No one on the government or religious level is discouraging Telugu. Maybe one could assert that there are high numbers of Telugus going overseas (people say that Telugus have four states, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, New Jersey, and Texas), but it is not a whole demographic upheaval like in Ireland. So, it seems that Telugu will survive forever … right?

While the coast seems clear for the Telugu language, there is one pervasive force, one that affects not only Telugu but all languages in India: education and job opportunities. In India, English is used at the professional level for the most sought-after and high-prestige fields: engineering, medicine, and government. So English is necessary in India for socio-economic advancement. This dynamic puts English in a prestige position, where English is the language of the educated and high class, and local languages are of the uneducated and low class.

This emphasis on English trickles down to childhood, influencing parental decisions regarding education. Many parents opt for English-medium schools (where teaching, exams, and textbooks are all in English), believing it provides their children with the best understanding of the language. In fact, my own grandmother, who is worrying so much about local languages, put my dad into an English-medium school. However, these schools often ban the use of local languages, leading to a decline in proficiency and literacy in those languages. This perpetuates a negative feedback loop, where people prioritize learning English to appear educated, further eroding proficiency in local languages, and making local languages seem unsophisticated, perpetuating the cycle.

This is precisely what my grandmother was alluding to when she mentioned that Indian languages have value. If this cycle persists, it’s possible that, over the course of several centuries, speakers of Telugu, and many others worldwide, will switch to English and other dominant languages, with the original languages relegated to fossils preserved in old books and movies.

Such a fate seems really grim because every language has something unique to it worth preserving. Imagine if all of the books that we read as kids in our literacy narratives became unreadable. Even if a translation was there, no one could capture the worth of trying new foods as Dr. Seuss does in Green Eggs and Ham. However, just as it takes a force to move languages on the path to extinction, it just takes a small counter-force to preserve every story and every language for years to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rplwgN6Xcc (Sonam Wangchuk’s ideas on English Medium)
https://udaras.ie/en/our-language-the-gaeltacht/history-of-the-irish-language/

Ever since I was born, my mom did her best to make sure that my brother and I were literate as early as possible. In her mind, being literate meant that one wouldn’t have to depend on a kindergarten teacher to know what the ABCs and 123s are. So, armed with Facebook parenting advice, foam letters bought from Walmart, and the promise of self-reliance, she tried to teach us how to read at nine months old. Naturally, all of our family laughed at her for trying to teach us to read before we could even understand speech. According to research, nine-month-old kids can’t even recognize their dad’s face, let alone remember i before e except after c. However, her efforts weren’t in vain because the early strategy was working. By two years old, we were remembering hundreds of spellings from Word World and by three years old, according to my mother, we spelled hippopotamus correctly on the preschool floor. However, despite this initial push, I was never self-motivated to read. I always tried to blast through books or comprehension exercises. I feel like this disconnect with reading was highlighted by my first reading memory, one of the dullest memories I have.

My earliest reading memory is of me reading Berenstain Bears. At that time, I was probably around four years old, just doing random things before bedtime. I don’t remember much about the story itself. It, like most Berenstain Bears stories, was probably a moral story, thinly veiled by the main cast of tree-dwelling characters, Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Brother Bear, and Sister Bear. The story is usually like this: The kids have an issue. Then, Papa tries to fix it but makes it worse. Enter Mama Bear, who uses her perfectionism to fix the whole situation. 

What I took away most from Berenstain Bears is the simplicity. For me as a little kid, having something that for the most part is predictable makes the book easier to read, and something easy to read gave me confidence in my reading abilities. It seemed that little me was happier to have the feeling of finishing a book easily than to have the feeling of reading something challenging, getting stuck, and learning something in the end.

This simplicity attitude continued well into elementary and middle school. Although my three-year-old literacy boost brought me to an advanced level compared to the rest of the kids, I still read easy books. One example is in fourth grade near the end of the year, when our standardized test scores came out. I was second in the class for reading comprehension, ahead of all my friends, but when we went to the library for reading time, my friends all picked out Rick Riordan books, while I picked out My Weird School Daze.  Although my skills were better than my friends, I never challenged myself. Slowly, without me noticing, by the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I realized that I was no longer on some literacy pedestal. I had become average or even below average in reading, and my writing skills were even worse. This all came to a head in Honors English 1 first semester, where I narrowly escaped getting a C, earning the wrath of my mom, the same person who taught me to read fourteen years prior.

From that point on, I decided to enhance my relationship with reading to improve my grades. I knew that I had to start somewhere, but I didn’t know where. On the recommendation of my grandmother, I started with Telugu news. She was closely looking at some of the news going on at the time and told me to follow it closely as well. I took up the challenge because I wanted to read more. I had to build literacy again, but this time in a different language. For example, I didn’t know basic words like aropana (accusation), vyatirekam (opposition), or jokyam (risk). I slowly started to jot down these words in a Google doc and improved my comprehension. I noticed that as I did this, I enhanced my reading skills in English as well by reading every word, gaining the main ideas out of every paragraph, and determining the meaning of words I didn’t know, skills transferable to any language. 

When I was in 9th grade, I was unsure that I could regain my literacy. However, I finally feel like I have regained it a little bit. My grades have even improved, getting me As in English in 10th and 11th grade. With better reading, I hope to understand the world better, learn about diverse perspectives, and write better, but above all, I wish to become the self-reliant reader that my mom always hoped I would be.

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