Mother Tongue

There must be a reason why we call the language that one speaks as a kid as mother tongue. In ancient times women folks were generally no that mobile and were not migrating as much as men.

So when a bunch of men migrated and displaced local population, they took the local women as their wives and the young kids learnt first the language of their mother and hence the mother tongue.

India and its languages

कोस-कोस पर पानी बदले, चार कोस पर वाणी

This is something which I have heard many people say. Kos is a unit which was used during the Vedic/Mughal times and is equivalent to 1.8 KM and what it means is this a country where the water tastes different every Kos and language changes every four Kos. Now how much of this is legacy and how much is reality now is an answer some linguists can say which I am off course not. 

Having spent my years growing up in Arunachal Pradesh that has diverse tribal culture and population. Each tribe has their own dialect and it is so different from one another that people belonging to different tribes don’t understand each other. Here is a table with various administration districts and languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh.

One can see that the population of these districts are not very high and it has Dibang Valley which is the least populated district in India 1 person/km2 but the number of languages that state has quite a lot. By some estimates there are 26 major tribes with 110 sub tribes  with spattering of their languages.

Since the tribes used to live in hills each of their languages grew in isolation and hence it exists even now.

When Arunachal was called North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA), the state was controlled from Shillong which was the capital of Composite Assam and the education system was controlled from the Sadiya (now submerged town in Assam). The Assam Education Manual, Syllabi and Curricula were followed till 1972 after which medium of instructions became English and from 1975 the CBSE Board schools were started. The common language of communication was Assamese for a long time and now with CBSE schools teaching in English and Hindi, these languages have gained ground. In some areas Nefamese probably something something in similar lines like Nagamese (a contact language of Nagaland) had started but didn’t spread lot as English and Hindi has picked up with CBSE schools.

Most of the local languages did not have a script and people started using English alphabets for the local languages as well. I am not sure now how many of these languages are still flourishing there. 

Mother Tongue For me

Having lived in Arunachal Pradesh, we were always switching the Hindi that one speaks at Home and outside. Generally Gender and Honorifics were dropped in the Hindi spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. Here is a simple example

आप कैसी हैं

तुम कैसा है

It was very normal for us to switch the Hindi. When we went later to college and found another Hindi of north India we were able to switch to that. So I speak three kinds of Hindi one with parents, with Arunachal friends and non Hindi speaking folks and then with so called “Hindi Belts”. I think that is where I picked English and also the switching into different accents.

The mother tongue for us is “Bhojpuri” and the recent book that I was reading Wanderers, Kings, Merchant by Peggy Mohan, whose Caribbean Father is from Indian descent of indentured laborers that were brought by the British for sugar cultivation, talks about this and more. This pushed to think about it more and also how Arunachal with so many languages that have survived for centuries in isolation.

Future of languages

With globalization many languages are losing out. When British left India their language English didn’t go with them but flourished into Indian English with its own pronunciation and phonetics. For many learning English opens opportunities that are out of bound otherwise. 

Like extinctions happening in the natural ecosystem, same is happening for many languages. When the young ones stop learning their mother tongue due to various reasons the languages wont survive for long.

According to a BBC report over the past century alone, around 400 languages – about one every three months – have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50% of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century (some put that figure as high as 90%, however)

Many of the languages that is on the table earlier are part of endangered languages as per the UNESCO’s list.