Authors: Michael Erard
As an aside, Ramu remembered, he can understand Telugu. “There are so many languages,” he said, laughing, “you forget.” He picked it up for business because local CEOs want
to speak it. “It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect,” Ramu said. “If you’re an outsider, they’re happy that you’re trying.” Most of his office is run in Hindi, though official email is always in English. Yet, once in a while in business meetings, when all the attendees realize they know Telugu, they switch.
In Mysore, we met Sri’s cousin’s brother, a slim, bald ninety-two-year-old man with great
fronds of eyebrows who’d been born and educated largely abroad. I’ll call him Siddhartha. “I don’t speak English.” He sniffed grandly. “I speak Shakespeare and Milton and George Shaw. I’m a plagiarist. I’m a pariah dog who speaks whatever he can pick up
and carry off.” It was much like meeting George Bernard Shaw must have been, if Shaw had worn a dhoti and ran a preschool on the second floor
of his house. It was hard to pin down exactly how many languages he’d known over his lifetime or how well; he dismissed other language accumulators as fantasists, including a civil servant he knew who claimed sixteen languages yet knew only a few words in most of them. It didn’t matter, though. I hadn’t really come to find another hyperpolyglot. I appreciated him more for his seasoned dismissal of
a unified thing called “English.” That sensibility about language would prove valuable.
One morning we drove with Siddhartha about ten kilometers outside Mysore, to an elementary school he founded. As we walked toward the assembly grounds, we could hear children’s voices singing prayers from the Vedas, a beautiful sound that grew louder as we approached. After the prayers, he addressed the orderly
rows of uniformed students about developments in Israel and Pakistan, and the recent financial news. Global in his outlook, he also promotes Sanskrit in the school, which is controversial because it’s a classical language more associated with the elite; in the West, the equivalent would be teaching Ancient Greek to schoolchildren. “They connect me with being an ambassador of India,” he told
me later, “so they think it’s not their cup of tea.”
After the assembly, he had to meet with some teachers, so my wife and I waited in the school library—stocked with his personal English literature collection—where we met a female student, Ananya, who said that her father knew ten languages, all Indian ones. She herself knew three and was learning Sanskrit, too.
As our ability to access foreign
languages with a mouse click has exploded, our sense of the world as a place where many languages are spoken—and that we might speak, too—has expanded. Is India the way we’re all headed?
Taking a trick from Siddhartha, I’ll leave aside the idea of a unified India to focus on south India. There, multilingualism in at least some of its forms arose out of circumstances that evolved over millennia,
after migrations, the rise and fall of empires, and invasions. All this turmoil helped to create a unique language phenomenon called a
Sprachbund,
in which people speaking many languages are all learning what everyone else speaks.
*
Existing side by side for centuries, the languages have melded and merged—not just in the words people use but in the grammars that structure them.
If you live in
a place where the people who speak languages A and B never confuse A with B, it may be hard to appreciate the fluidity of this situation. So it’s helpful to review three of the events that were so important for India’s linguistic history—and that couldn’t have been duplicated anywhere else.
One was an extended southward migration by Indo-European peoples, which began around 1500 BCE. They brought
with them Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, which they imposed on speakers of Dravidian languages in the south. Embedded in Dravidian languages (the largest groups now are Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers) is the story of how these people learned, though imperfectly, the Indo-Aryan languages of the arriving conquerors, and changed those languages, too. Over the next three thousand
years, the languages of the two families gradually fused. Trading and borrowing between them became more complex, going as it did in all directions, and far beyond nouns to the deeply patterned stuff that’s invisible to a language’s speaker. The languages borrowed each other’s sound patterns: most of the Indian languages, whether Dravidian or Indo-Aryan, have consonants a speaker makes with
the tongue against the teeth that contrast with consonants a speaker makes with the tongue curled back. Word forms, word types, and grammatical patterns—all of which take a long time to migrate among languages—were borrowed, too. For instance, Sanskrit, though it’s an Indo-European language, eventually acquired very un-Indo-European grammatical features that clearly come from the Dravidian group.
What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples—neat and discrete—and more like oatmeal. It’s always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite
political pressures to name them as if they were marbles. The languages that people speak to each other do have sharply etched borders within regional varieties of the same language (such
as Hindi), the dialects of different castes, and the pidgin languages born where speakers of different languages come in contact.
The evolution of the
Sprachbund
is so glacially slow and massive that it’s basically invisible; because it moves so slowly, people can still give a separate name to each of the linguistic varieties they use. This produces an odd situation: people speak five languages,
but they’re not really five languages. To put it another way, the cultural reality has five languages, but the cognitive reality doesn’t. As with the hyperpolyglot, the number of languages can’t be the relevant unit of measure here. The relevant unit is the whole of the linguistic “something and something” that someone knows. As Vivian Cook suggested, “It’s their multicompetence.”
South India’s
second significant invasion was its slow conquest by Persian-speaking Muslims, starting around 700 CE. Crossed with the military jargon of the invaders, Sanskrit birthed a language called Hindustani. For complicated political reasons in the mid-twentieth-century, Hindustani split into Hindi and Urdu.
Added to this mix was the third invasion, the arrival of the English. First introduced in 1583,
when Queen Elizabeth sent the first exploratory mission to India, English became institutionalized with the rise of British political influence in 1757. In the ensuing 250 years, English became something other than merely a foreign language, though how many Indians speak English is disputed—figures range from 5 to 50 percent of the population. Upper castes such as Brahmins were historically incorporated
into the British imperial structure and given access to English educations; later, they inherited the power structure along with independence.
Both Muslims and the British found a cultural landscape that was already thick with languages. British official George Grierson surveyed the colony’s languages in the late nineteenth century and found that “there are parts of India that recall the confusion
in the Land of Shinar where the tower of old [that is, Babel] was built, in which almost each petty group of tribal villages has its own separate language.” He also found “great plains,” thousands and thousands of miles square, “over which one language is spoken from end to end.”
Then as now, counting Indian languages completely and accurately is a task that would craze a generation of survey
takers. But there are some statistics that give form to the linguistic landscape. In 2005, the language with the most speakers was Hindi, with 180 million mother-tongue speakers and 120 million second-language speakers—rivaling the number of native English speakers worldwide (328 million). The next most populous Indian languages are Bengali, with 70 million speakers, and Telugu, with 69 million.
Ninety-five percent of the population speaks one of twenty-two languages; it’s not exactly known how many speak more than one.
According to the 1991 census, India had 20 million bilinguals and 7 million trilinguals, a very low number that will probably increase in the next full national survey. But you don’t need a survey. Just flip through the cable channels or visit the newsstand to see the
modern version of what Grierson encountered: newspapers are published in at least 34 languages and radio and television broadcasts in 104.
I sat in my hotel room and watched Hindi television, where English words and whole sentences mixed with Hindi. The mixing of languages apparently has had a very long history in Indian literature, but all of it was lost to me; I longed to know enough Kannada
and Telugu and Hindi to be able to identify their fusions, too.
The Hindu cultures have been pluralistic for millennia, celebrating tensions and moving fluidly among them. Plurilingualism seems to be a natural extension of this. One metaphor for Hinduism that seemed to capture this quality comes from religion scholar Wendy Doniger, who called it “one house with many mansions,” which also captures
the linguistic life of the south Indians I met. In the West, a person with multiple identities and affiliations seems obliged to struggle or feel confusion. Here, the more the merrier.
This expansiveness was on display in what I could piece together of Sri and Kala’s family history. About three hundred years ago, Sri’s ancestors left the southern kingdom of Madras (now the state of Tamil Nadu)
and migrated north to Bangalore, bringing Tamil with them. Rather than dropping Tamil for Kannada, the language of Bangalore, they simply added Kannada to the mix. Around two hundred years later, in 1911, his father moved to Hyderabad, and instead of dropping Tamil and
Kannada, family members broadened their repertoire, again, by adding Telugu. Meanwhile, formal education and professional work
brought together Hindi and English. By the time Sri and Kala’s sons were born, in the early 1970s, the family had accumulated so many languages, they didn’t have a single “mother tongue.”
“We speak Hindi a lot,” said one of Sri’s nieces. “All of us speak Telugu, but when more of us are together, we speak Tamil. Then, when we get even more together, we speak Kannada.” They are exposed to so many
languages from a very young age, they don’t really know how many there are, she added. By the time she was five, she had five languages (Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, and English) and now she can understand three others (Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi). For her, each language presumably has its own resonances. Speaking them all is a reenactment of family history, a way to transport the accumulated
past into the present.
India is no multilingual utopia, however. Neither is it a model for how to build a peaceful society with multiple languages. People’s feelings about language spark conflict and violence all over the world; why should India be any different? Deep discontents about languages roil, and the history of the country is checkered with intolerance and violence.
You only need a
few examples to get the flavor of the problem. In 1999, language police in the state of Karnataka objected to a sign that was written in three languages and three scripts: English, Hindi, and Kannada, in that order, with the words running from top to bottom. Then the police began to bicker: Shouldn’t Kannada be on the left, a place of honor, since it would be read first? Or should Kannada be in the
center, a place of respect, since it would be flanked by the other two? Just the fact that “language police” monitor signage reflects deeper tensions. Or perhaps they’re just thugs, like the ones who beat up shopkeepers in Mumbai who use English, not Marathi, on their signs.
In Hyderabad, Kala said that in the 1960s, her stepmother never sanctioned Kala’s sister’s marriage to a man who, though
he was from the same caste, spoke Kannada. Fifteen years later, when Kala’s other sister married a Telugu speaker, the stepmother was forced to accept the husband. Why should people be open about language differences, when they are such a convenient index of other attitudes? (I learned
later that the language difference would be taken as a sign that the marriage wasn’t a traditional arranged marriage
but a more controversial love marriage.) In the weeks we were in India, Hindu fundamentalists attacked Indian women dressed in Western clothes (in one case, dragging women out of a Mangalore bar and beating them), accusing the women of being untraditional and of not being able to speak Kannada. In another incident, one girl, the daughter of a member of Parliament, was dragged from a bus and
beaten for talking to a Muslim teenage boy; one news report I read suggested she’d been unable to extricate herself because she didn’t know Kannada.
Also complicating Indian multilingualism is that the languages don’t have the same social or economic status. Those who speak a global, brand-name language tend to have higher status than those who claim a mother tongue with fewer speakers. (By no
means is this peculiar to India.) English and regional languages like Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil are already locked in a slow-moving war. In this case, it’s the tectonics not of grammars but of actual politics. Given the sheer number of their speakers, none of those languages seems endangered—Kannada has 35 million speakers, Telugu 74 million, Tamil 68 million. But as journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju
wrote in
Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue,
the Kannada language (and presumably the other Dravidian tongues) is endangered less by English per se than by a “very amorphous techno-global identity” called “cosmopolitanism.” To become a member of the world society, a global citizen, you have to learn English. To the degree that people perceive that the global stage is their only goal, they are
leaving local languages behind.
“Local languages and mother tongues seemed to be slipping away into the realms of nostalgia without a serious functional purpose in the outer world,” Srinivasaraju wrote. “They were being forced into a clipped and compromised existence in the drawing rooms and kitchens of their speakers.” Himself a proud Kannada speaker, Srinivasaraju noted how writing in English
left him without the time to devote to the Kannada literary movement, an elite that was itself dwindling. Once it lost its public face, the language began losing its power. Columbia University Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock wrote in a 2008 editorial in
The Hindu
that many classical texts in Indian languages were in danger
of being forgotten because no scholars were being trained to read them.
“Within two generations, the Indian literary past—one of the most luminous contributions ever made to human civilization—may be virtually unreadable to the people of India,” Pollock wrote.