The Diabolic Murder Of The Mother Tongue

February 21 was declared International Mother Tongue Day. The mother tongue is described as the first language an individual learns, also called primary language.

This term defines the language that people know best and use the most, the communication tool people most closely identify themselves with. It is with this concept in mind that the celebration of Mother Language Day was created, to represent two crucial components of the value of all world languages.

Languages are the communication tools used by human beings to channel their expressions of identity and belonging, while mother tongue represents the most familiar language that one experiences while learning to communicate.

But few men and women in their mid-thirties and younger can read, write and understand their mother tongue today. They were neither taught nor shown any inclination about reading Tagore or Sarat Chandra in original Bengali because they cannot read the language and worse still, are neither apologetic nor sorry about it.

The other day, I saw a teenaged boy trying to find the Bengali equivalent of an English word from a Bengali dictionary. He failed because he had never learnt to read Bengali. He had to take his mother’s help to complete his project. He studied in an elite English International School and Bengali was his third language.

His mother seemed quite proud that her son thought, read, wrote and understood English and even at home, his Bangla sentences were heavily peppered with English when he communicated with his grandparents.

How important is one’s mother tongue to the citizens of tomorrow? In an age of rapid globalization and the jet-age speed with which we are on the information highway, ‘not much’ if one were to consider urban children in most English-speaking countries of the world.

The mother tongue cannot afford to receive step-motherly treatment from social and academic circles. It helps the infant step down from the mother’s lap to crawl, take its first tottering steps and then run to join the world. Language per se, including the mother tongue, does not have an existence of its own. It exists only in relation to human beings.

A language exists in limbo until human beings have used it through their mouths, ears, hands, eyes and brain. Language is linked to its communicative qualities, its qualities of expression and articulation in writing, in print and in vocal articulation. The mother-tongue as a language for daily use in life and at work, in reaching out and crossing borders, has received a bad beating at the hands of more ‘elite’ and universally accepted languages like English or French for urban and elite Indians.

Sadly, the original conversational and colloquial Bengali has vulgarised itself through street talk among youngsters and from topical Bengali films and television serials. Go to any current Bangla feature film and your education in vulgarity, invectives and slang in Bangla will shock you. Just like “f…” is an inevitable part of the lingo used in any English film, a litany of dirty words are omnipresent in Bengali films, OTT series and private television channels.

The audience, generally packed with youngsters through word-of-mouth publicity, crowd the theatres chiefly to cheer, clap, whistle and scream when the said words are repeated on screen. And the reels on our cell phones put the final nail on the coffin of our mother tongue.

One young director proudly told me that he thoroughly enjoys Bengali films that pride in the prolific use of dirty slang mouthed by female characters. What do you say to that? How then, do we draw the divided line between the ruffians and the urban, educated young? How do we differentiate between the maid and the mistress? Or, the prostitute and the housewife? The corporate honcho and the street smart goonda? Or, do we pride ourselves on this new ‘democracy’ in language, specially, the mother tongue?

Will the pristine Bengali we were taught in school or drilled into us by our Bengali parents be reduced to an entire lexicon of ‘dirty’ words in another twenty years? Will language specialists and scholars begin to write a completely different Bengali dictionary to ‘educate’ us? Will parents still feel proud of their children because their English is strong but their Bengali is zero?

According to UNESCO, roughly over 6,000 languages are spoken across the world. At least 50 per cent of them are expected to die out during the current century. It is a real challenge to ensure that the 'endangered' languages, 95 per cent of which are spoken by only four per cent of the world's population, continue to be used alongside the world's major languages.

Monolingual countries like Japan, China, Korea, France and Germany, made rapid progress as a result of imparting basic and higher education to their citizens in their own languages. History has shown that the economic development of these countries has not suffered in the least as the result of the paucity of knowledge and use of English.

No one is suggesting the replacement of English with the mother tongue in education. But basic education in the mother tongue has always proved to be a big boost to the macro-sociology of the country and to the development of the personality of the child. Studies show that we learn better in our mother tongue. But then it has to be taught in school, which is not the case for all minority languages. More convinced than ever of the value of multilingualism, certain countries are trying to promote learning in a number of languages. However, the political and economic obstacles are enormous.

The celebration of International Mother Tongue day recognized by UNESCO in 1999, has a history of bloodshed and violence that took the lives of innocent people, including students, scholars and intellectuals because they asserted their right to use their mother tongue, Bengali, in all forms of communication in place of Urdu. This day is February 21. It celebrates the martyrdom of people who laid down their lives during the Language Movement in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

With the growth in Bangla speaking communities around the world, particularly in the last 41 years, this language and culture is reportedly being taught in a large number of schools and Universities for the second generation and others interested in the language and culture. In the United States, for example, there are at least six Universities that offer courses in Bangla language and culture.

There are requests from students for courses in Bangla -- especially at Universities that also offer other South Asian Languages. In response to these requests, the University of Michigan in 2005 obtained a five-year matching grant of US$100,000 from the Federal Government. To benefit from this grant, the University needed to raise US$20,000 per year for five years. Thereafter, the cost of the Bangla program would be covered from student fees.

According to the 1961 Census, India has 1652 mother tongues identified with various nomenclatures in post-Independent India such as Scheduled Languages, Non-Scheduled languages, Regional languages, major languages, minor languages, minority languages, tribal languages, etc There is no mention of the word ‘mother tongue’ anywhere in this classification.

This creates fear in our minds about the complete disappearance of many of these 1652 languages by sheer virtue of a classification based on a hierarchy of caste and class. The classification automatically creates a ‘ghetto’ in language, leading to fragmentation of language based on caste and class and thus, power – economic, cultural and social.

The aesthetic, scriptural and literal qualities of any mother tongue will remain unknown to the world, till it dies an ignominious death at the hands of politics, bureaucracy, E-mail, the Internet and the Establishment.

One is reminded of Vigdis Finnbogadottir, UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador for Languages, Former President of Iceland, who said: “Everyone loses if one language is lost because then a nation and culture lose their memory, and so does the complex tapestry from which the world is woven and which makes the world an exciting place.”

But the dollar and the pound speak in English, remember?