This is not to argue that language is not a political matter at all. But there are certain scientific aspects about language, which linguists alone can justifiably explain. Vice President (VP) Parmananda Jha’s oath-taking in Hindi has triggered all this and made us think more deeply about the role of language in our lives, politics, society and the country that is preparing to federalize. As for oath-taking as a ceremony, this scribe presented his argument in the previous column a fortnight back. This column is exclusively about language now, not about whether we should have the oath-taking ceremony or not.
Nepali linguists would do a great service to the nation struggling to federalize by coming out in the open from their cornered dens.
It is the inborn linguistic blueprint that enables human beings to be what they have become. It is through language that humans acquire knowledge, store experience and develop wisdom. We have nearly seven thousand languages in the world as manifestations of the basic universal human capacity for language. There are certain linguistic theories that argue that we human beings even dissect nature along the lines laid down by our mother tongue. The human cognitive capacity is solely dependent on the language faculty, which every single human being is born with. It is not always the case that we acquire a given knowledge through a language. It may also be the case that the knowledge we acquire is shaped by the nature of the language we speak as our first language. The way we conceive even the broad space-time dimensions is conditioned, arguably, by the language we speak as our mother tongue.
While it is merely a coincidence that human beings are born into certain families that speak certain languages, once we start to naturally acquire a particular language, it becomes the central instrument of cognition, knowledge and every other human social behavior. It is in this process that a certain language is attached to us as our identity. When human beings are divided in their identities into different cultural and ethnic groups, it is most natural that they have their identity as a group by virtue of their belongingness to a certain linguistic community. People across the globe are divided into identity categories first on cultural/civilizational lines (i.e. Asians, Europeans, Americans), then on nationalities and languages.
The Madhes-based political parties in Nepal have been struggling to establish Hindi as their common language. There is an apparent antipathy towards this from the non-Madhes parties and people, primarily on the ground that Hindi is the dominant language in India and its obvious political repercussions. We do not hear any significant linguist taking on the challenge to analyze the need for any language to be established or the other way round. Just compare this with the demand (now already agreed through the interim constitution) for federalism, which also primarily originated from the Madhes movement. In addition to the political parties, we have dozens of experts – political scientists, geographers, politicians and others – who have proposed numbers of federal models and created substantive discourses substantiated by arguments based on data and facts. But when it comes to the recognition of languages in the restructured new Nepal, there is almost no debate except those linked to the federal models’ discussions.
The Madhes parties themselves could have had linguists to give a linguistic rationale in favor of the Hindi language. Are the Maithili, Bhojpuri and Awadh languages, for instance, more close to Hindi or to Nepali? According to statistics, is Nepali a more common lingua franca – the link language in Tarai – or Hindi? What we hear every day is just political aggressiveness in favor of or against Hindi but there is no non-political expert view on this. Due to a dearth of such discourse, our VP is forced to announce in Nepali that he cannot speak Nepali. If experts of the field had produced academic arguments, he could have saved himself from linguistic disgrace by taking recourse to the linguists’ arguments. Again, due to a lack of sufficient linguistic study, the Madhes leaders have been accused of promoting Hindi as per the interest of India. Whether this accusation is true or not is a controversial matter. However, if they have some non-political – and purely scientific from a linguist’s point of view – arguments, it would certainly help themselves as well as the ‘hilly’ paranoids who associate everything with India in this regard.
We have left almost everything in the hands of the politicians alone, which may account for the pitiable conditions the country is facing today. We have even left the technical academic matters like languages issues in the hands of the politicians. Of course, the decisions on granting or not granting certain status to any language are to be determined at a political level. However, those decisions need to be informed and influenced by the experts in the concerned area. For this, we need to distinguish politics from linguistic facts and theories for the time being. Once the linguists inform the political discourse on language issues, politicians can take the matter to their level for final determination. Language is not merely an instrument to communicate; it is also an instrument for a society’s collective cognitive growth. Nepali linguists would do a great service to the nation struggling to federalize by coming out in the open from their cornered dens. It is also an opportunity for them to link pure academic research with social transformation. So linguists, please speak up and inform politics!
bishnu.sapkota@gmail.com
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