#2 Internet: The Slaughterhouse and the Museum

In the years to come, we'll see internet kill a number of languages, but maybe it will be their savior as well.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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Like a lot of my stories this one too has its roots in the 1990s exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. To the uninitiated, Kashmiri Pandits were ethnic minorities of Kashmir who were forced to leave the homeland due to the ethnic cleansing in 1990. Since the tiny community got dispersed throughout the country, the culture started diluting starting with the language.

This sparked off a need to preserve the language and the culture. There was no major coordinated plan, just decentralized action by individuals. One such initiative was Valiv Zan Karav (Kashmiri: “Let’s get introduced”), a WhatsApp/Telegram based initiative to teach Kashmiri. I joined the “classes” sometime in 2019 or maybe a couple of years before that and continued intermittently for a few years. More than the language classes, it was the use of technology, specifically chat messengers, for teaching that fascinated me.

The Slaughterhouse

There are thousands of languages around the globe and this number must have been higher in the past. The increased human interaction in last few centuries has led to the consolidation of the number of speakers around the globe. Certain languages gained speakers due to preference by kings, other due to merchants. This trend has been going on for millennia.

The next phase of consolidation of languages occurred with the advent of a globalized economy. Colonial powers spread their languages and as countries started getting freedom in the 20th century, these colonial languages were used by the former colonies to interact with a global world. Even more than colonization, globalization consolidated the hold of English and other European languages. People now willingly wanted to learn English to access the opportunities that a globalized world promised.

This brings us to the current era: the internet age. Today languages are losing speakers faster than ever. Internet and smartphones are now a need more than a want. From government services to entertainment, everything is increasingly available primarily through the internet.

But the internet, for most parts, is in English. You might watch Hindi or Punjabi videos on YouTube but the URL you type in is in English. More than the websites, a vast majority of devices don’t even support all or most Indian languages. This means that English has become a necessity now, for people to access their everyday needs.

Even when we chat now, we might be speaking any of the Indian languages but what we essentially are doing is typing out the sounds in English. So, English by default becomes the languages you use at best, or at worst Roman script becomes your default.

Now this might seem like an oversimplification to you. You might say that typing Hindi in English does not end Hindi but to that I’d like to point you to the next technology trend. As technology gets more accessible and more integrated in our lives it will become the default setting of humans.

Think about it – young kids now learn how to use phones even before they go to school or read. Which means that for most parts, they are being introduced to English on your smartphones and on the TV even before they are introduced to a book in “their” language.

The longer we take to adapt (or force) internet to be in Indian languages the higher is the probability of these languages to die out. But even if we act in time, not all languages will survive’ For languages that do not have a critical mass, the demise will be drawn out but inevitable.

The Museum

While the Internet will be the killer of these languages, I can’t help but think that Internet will also be their savior. The languages will die out, no doubt about that, but since internet is one giant archive, it will preserve the remains of the languages that it kills.

With the prices of data transmissions and storage coming down, its cheaper to store more and more content online. Going by the prices of cloud storage, it would be cheaper for me to preserve not just a book but also its narration in video form today than it would have been to buy or preserve a nearly extinct book 40 years ago.

The internet will also lead to a renewed interest and research into these languages. As these languages die, they will pass on from the tongues of commoners to the books of academics and this will spark a renewed interest into the analysis of these languages. This, like a mummy in a museum, will keep these languages alive even when they die, and maybe this will take languages to the places they could not venture on their own.

Conclusion

Kashmiri is a dying language but not dead by any measure. When I was a kid, everyone from public intellectuals and government to commoners believed that it was about to go extinct. Frantic appeals were made, it was hurriedly added to school curriculum and so on. But a decade or so later, the fears have subsided. Government action did not amount to much, but private action has surpassed it in impact.

Initiatives like “Valiv Zan Karav” have not only increased the accessibility to anyone learning the language, but it also led to a much wider dispersion geographically. The group had ‘students’ not only from Kashmir or even India but throughout the globe. So, there is a hope for survival.

But at the same time, almost no one in that group earns their living speaking Kashmiri and that might be the future of a lot of languages in the foreseeable future. It’s not a cause for dismay necessarily, as languages at their very core, are the tools for communication. As long as we don’t lose our human bonds, we should be thankful for the role these languages played in the growth of our respective cultures and maybe that’s the best we can do.

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Related Content:

1. [Blog Post: On preservation of Culture and Land Laws] Written post abrogation of article 370, I discuss the preservation of culture in a greater detail here

2. [Video: Awadhi – The Language of Ayodhya] This YouTube video (in Hindi) by India In Pixels traces the history and the present of Awadhi, a language that most would consider to be Hindi but is actually a separate language with a rich history of its own.

3. [Story: Home — The Pain in Survival] A non-fictional account of my visit to my home post the 2016 Kashmir floods.