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.”
My grandmother, a proud monolingual Telugu speaker
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.
The two Telugu-speaking states of India, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, in red
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/
This is such an interesting topic and one that has such serious consequence. You address the cause and and effect of losing the language with delicacy and concern. You discuss the history of the languages been morphed into other languages and I find that fascinating. This is a powerful topic and I am glad to have read this piece. Thanks for your insights.
The topic you chose is extremely interesting. It makes sense that as globalization continues the world will progressively switch to the dominant language, which in this case is English. That being said, I am not sure if this is good or bad. Obviously having individual languages preserves culture, but sharing the same language breaks down barriers between communities. People being bilingual would be great, but as with Ireland, it seems that much of that is fading away. Additionally, I am interested to see what will happen in the future with China progressively controlling a larger portion of the global economy. Nearby nations like Korea and Japan have already adjusted their economies to respond more to China than the United States (a contrast to the late 1900s where they were more respondent to the United States). It will be interesting to see if a language other than English will eventually become dominant in many non-native speaking nations.
Hi Deeraj,
This is definitely something that I can relate to. My family is from Shanghai, and as you might know, there are many different dialects throughout China, but the Government doesn’t care much for that. They have a fixation on Mandarin and nothing else being taught in Chinese schools. Shanghainese is still commonly used in the city, but its a rapidly dying language. It’s not taught in schools, and many elderly Chinese folk are taking Chinese lessons so they can talk to their children, who didn’t bother to learn Shanghainese. For me, I can understand it perfectly, but conversing in it is difficult. Even so, it still bleeds through in my Chinese. But, it has never been of much value to me, except in Shanghai. It’s something that I wish I could speak better, and spread on more to help preserve the place where I’m from, but as your post mentions perfectly, there is almost no reason to do so. The world will move on whether people speak Telugu, Shanghainese, or not. It’s a sad consequence of our globalization.
Hi Deeraj,
First I want to say that it’s clear language is very important to you. I read your first post and you talked about the personal importance of the Telugu language in that post as well. It shows you’ve put a lot of thought into this and know what you’re talking about. That said, you brought up some really interesting ideas that were really eye opening about language. I had never thought about all the societal factors that go into a language’s survival. Languages are built up by cultures, opportunities, and relevance. At the same time languages, the pillars that hold languages up are knocked down when newer “fancier” languages come into the light. But these older languages still hold so much value and can’t be replicated with just a translation so its important people work to preserve them. It’s like you said, who could write a Dr. Seuss book better than Dr. Seuss.
Deeraj, I really appreciate the analytical way you approached this blog post. I never really had an understanding of what causes languages to die but I think you did a really good job of explaining this phenomenon in your post. I think that the way you discussed how different factors affect the fate of a language was really insightful and helped me better understand your argument. I think that it is really unfortunate that languages like Telugu and Irish face the possibility of being lost, and I wonder if it can be prevented, or if it is an unavoidable side-effect of living in an increasingly globalized society. At the end of your post, you mention that it just takes a small counter-force to preserve these dying languages. What I am wondering is what type of counter-force or actions are you referring to that can preserve languages? And do you think those methods will be enough to conserve their significance and cultural value of them?