Love your Language

By Ujala Mir Masood

I do not remember the last time my aunt told me to talk to my little cousins in Urdu. She is more concerned about improving their English.

“Sir, bajli kab aaye gi?” I still remember how my whole class burst out laughing despite the heat and sweat odour in that packed room. This girl was not a foreigner, she was one of those students who are considered the ‘elite’ of our society. So, the point I’m trying to make here is, what deranged form of Urdu was that?

I remember from childhood how my parents were proud of me when I read ‘English’ storybooks all by myself and happily bought all the Disney videos I ever wanted. I love them for it — my creativity still hasn’t run out. However, when I go back in time and think about it I wonder why I was never encouraged to read Urdu books or why no one ever gifted me one of those books we look at and groan since they are printed in Urdu and are, therefore, entirely incomprehensible for us.

I do not remember the last time my aunt told me to talk with my little cousins in Urdu. She is more concerned about improving their English. Nowadays, when someone, especially from the so-called elite class, is able to actually speak in fluent Urdu with no grammatical errors and a clear understanding of the language, most people tend to think that person is ‘old fashioned’. In fact, I have lost count of the number of proud teenagers who shamelessly claim that they are on the verge of flunking in Urdu.

I am not saying that we should be experts in the language but we should at least be able to speak in a normal, non-mutilating way and be able to write at least simple words.

So why exactly are we so obnoxiously abandoning our language? It is more than just a script; it is part of our identity. I did not realise the importance of Urdu until I moved out of Pakistan recently. Ask any Pakistani living abroad what they miss the most and many of them are going to tell you that they miss conversations in Urdu.

People around the world value their mother tongue and, whatever their nationality, they protect it with their hearts. The French-speaking people do not reply to a person who speaks to them in English. In Paris, you can get a better response if you talk in Urdu than in English. They not only prefer their own language, but also make us feel incompetent for not knowing it. Of course, their patriotism is admirable.

So why do we, as Pakistanis, behave differently? We should also take pride in our language and try to protect it. It is one of the things that sets us apart from the others.

It is said that a country’s future is decided more by its past i.e. its culture, social and educational background and the language. In our case the British ruled over us and that explains our fixation towards the English language. However, this fixation goes far beyond the normal parameters. We does tend to take pride in speaking in English rather than Urdu. Why does this downhill roll towards destruction of the language our country’s founders actually fought to protect and flourish continously.

Simply stating that it’s a competitive world will not do. China, one of the fastest developing nations, protects its language fiercely. How many English and American students can claim to be smarter than them? What makes us think that if we master our language we will be losing in the rat race?

Societal pressure, of course, is one of the most solid and unreasonable excuses for this thinking we have developed about our language. If we let our language die we lose part of our culture and, of course, part of our belonging to our country. If those who are considered as elite of the society cannot speak Urdu, what image do they present to the world? A person who runs away from home does so because he is fed up of it. If we run away from our own language, would that not mean that we are fed up of our own culture. It is something we preserved for years, projected, and now are so willing to abandon.

A teacher once rightly said, “How can you expect to master another person’s language when you cannot master your own?”

Via Dawn - The Review.

Last of Nepal’s Dura speakers

Soma Devi Dura needs medical treatment

Plans are being made to extend medical help to an octogenarian woman in Nepal who is the last known speaker of a minority language.

None of the rest of Soma Devi Dura’s family speak Dura, despite being from the same ethnic group.

The only other person who could speak the language died last August.

Now Soma Devi Dura’s health is ailing at her home in the hills of western Nepal, and she has severely impaired sight and hearing.

Surprises

But the 82-year-old is a rich source of songs and folklore in the Dura tongue.

In order to communicate with her husband, children and grandchildren she has to use other languages, because she is now believed to be the only surviving speaker of Dura, which belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family.

The only other Dura speaker died in August

Languages decline like this when parents fail to pass them down or children lose interest in them.

But some scholars are striving to preserve Dura.

Kedar Nagila, who as a child played with Dura children who had already lost their language, has compiled 1,500 words and 250 sentences.

He wants to take Soma Devi to Kathmandu for medical treatment, and to interest Dura children in taking lessons in the language.

‘Amazingly fluent’

Nepal has more than 100 tongues, several with fewer than 100 speakers each.

Research can throw up surprises.

Recently the three recorded speakers of another language, Kusunda, all died or disappeared.

But campaigners for indigenous rights went to western Nepal and found a mother and daughter speaking it, and an isolated woman in a different district.

They were brought together, and the woman was able to converse in Kusunda for the first time since 1940, when she was 10 years old.

Linguistics Professor Madhav Prasad Pokharel said she was “amazingly fluent”.

Although he has been inspired by the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, he admits that reviving these tiny Nepalese languages is unlikely.

But he argues fervently that they can and should be preserved and taught.

Is the hyphen facing extinction?

By Giles Foden
Yes, if the lexicographers are right. The latest revision of the Oxford English Dictionary eschews them, dumping more than 16,000 examples (including the crucial ‘fig-leaf’) for their compound equivalents (‘figleaf’). The reason? ‘Our world of fast keying and quick edits onscreen has largely given up searching for the hyphen.’

The poets won’t like it, or so one first thinks. How could Hopkins have praised ‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’ without a hyphen? In fact, the jury is still out on hyphens in poetry. Many early poets’ work varies hyphenation in different versions of the same text.

Nor do style guides agree on the hyphen. Fowler’s Modern English Usage makes a detailed study, then admits ‘usage is so variable as to be better named caprice’. Another style book says: ‘If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.’ Sir Ernest Gowers, author of The Complete Plain Words, replies: ‘I have no intention of taking hyphens seriously.’

So it doesn’t matter if they are being used less frequently? It does matter, but more because of politics than poetry or punctuation. Arab-Americans, for example, might set much store by them at the moment, just as other hyphenated Americans did when President Woodrow Wilson disparaged them back in 1919: ‘I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic.’

Actually, the great thing about American society is that it compounds and separates at the same time, making both the universal and exceptional case. That’s also the virtue of the term-cleaving hyphen. Maybe its death onscreen is really saying something about the American empire and its provinces in cyberspace. Perhaps this is a moment anthropologists of the future, looking down like hungry falcons on the blue-bleak embers of our world, will identify as a tipping point. Or tipping-point.

— Dawn/Guardian Service