There's an article on Reuters about how China's minority languages might soon be wiped out by the rise of "super-languages" like English and Mandarin.
It's not just China. A friend of mine comes from a small minority community in southern India. His family speaks an ancient language that, like several of the Chinese languages mentioned, has no existing written script.
"I'm one of the last of the people who'll speak it," he says with glum certainty.
The rapid spread of Bollywood and television - Hindi-dominated media - into rural homes has brought Hindi to an ever-wider audience. But not everyone is happy about it. In Southern India, old-fashioned families still refuse to speak Hindi on the grounds that Southern langauges are closer to Sanskrit and India's own history. Hindi is one of the "super-languages" mentioned in the article.
Langauge sensitivity is an accepted part of Indian politics, ever since Hindi was proposed as our national language and the entire South rebelled. The Shiv Sena, a Mumbai-based political party that often resorts to thuggery to achieve its ends, has made news on several occasions for imposing the Marathi langauge on Mumbai's Hindi speakers. Just a few days ago a gang of Sena activists vandlized the Bombay Natural History Society, a landmark a little like India's Audobon Society, for using the antiquated name "Bombay" in its title. The Sainiks also been known to rough up members of Parliament.
In Maximum City, author Suketu Mehta rails against the Sainiks for ruining the city, but he too gets sucked into language politics.
"There was no need to rename Bombay," he writes. "I'll always be a Bombay boy."
Mayawati Kumari, the Chief Minister of the states of Uttar Pradesh, prefers to deliver speeches in Hindi to make a political point.
It's not hard to understand why.
In India, where we have so many languages to choose from, speaking the same language is, for some people, a strong common bond. I've met with politicos from India's old guard, who love to pepper their English with Hindi. It's not about fluency - some of these guys have college degrees from the US and England - it''s about being a "Bombay boy." English is the language of business, but Hindi is still the language of family and friendship.
This, too, is changing. If India's minority languages are under threat, so is Hindi itself. No one in my generation speaks Hindi like my grandparents do. We've all surrendered to the rise of "Hinglish." Hinglish (Hingurduglish?) is the primary language of Bollywood. I've even found occasional English words sneaking their way into government reports written in Hindi.
The same thing is happening in China, with "Chinglish." (I'm not using that term in a derogatory way.) The term "super-language" implies a false separation between the world's major languages. It doesn't reflect the real effect that globalization is having on all language, which is to bring us ever closer to the days before the Tower of Babel.
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