The Burden of Language

I’ll be making some more exceptions in the coming months by posting earlier content here, so that I don’t lose access to them. Here’s one I sometimes think about, originally published on Medium.

Before the popularity of Google Lens though.

When you have been mulling over something for more than a decade, it’s time you put keypad to word.

Speaking of word, there’s nothing quite as fascinating. Language, constructed over hundreds of years, by thousands of tribes, is much more than means to communicate. It’s a shared history of evolution, violence and learning.

Were it not for language, so easily dismissed as arts, fields of learning from literature to science would cease to exist. There would be no medium to carry thoughts forward or preserve knowledge gained.

Mere words take the form of beautiful poetry, complicated instructions, never ending theses and stirring speeches that educate, inspire, humour and move.

So if a language (be it any) is worth learning, it’s worth learning well.

We can’t continue to live in the past and wish away our history. Yes, we were illustrious and thriving once and got plundered. So has been the story of time — the conquerors oppress and the vanquished suffer. The last ones to rule us, unlike the ones before them, drained us of our wealth. But it’s been some time since. And because we can’t change the past, we must learn from it. There should come a point when it’s no longer a choice between condoning and blaming, but between dwelling on what’s lost and moving ahead with the determination to set things right.

If we are, however, hell-bent on declaring war on the former chains of imperialism, why single out language? On the one hand, we have happily adopted a certain way of life, allowed western influence to reflect in the way we eat, dress or travel. On the other, we continue to treat language with suspicion, letting English retain its ‘foreign’ heritage, and increasingly use it as a double-edged sword.

If you are fluent in the language, you are pandering to invisible masters, instead of the more natural acknowledgement that cultural assimilation of over two and a half centuries exists.

We will be gravely short-sighted if we undermine the subversive potential of a post-colonial language. If appropriated to suit our needs, it can serve to not just bridge the communication gap between our disparate states but used as a practical tool to enhance international ties or become global thought leaders. A shining example of this is the United States, which has owned the language of England and made peace with removing the ‘u’ and trading the ‘s’ for ‘z’. You rebel one letter at a time.

If God forbid, you are not fluent, it bizarrely becomes a measure of your intelligence.

Embracing another’s language is no carte blanche for disassociating from your own. It is downright appalling to find people speak their mother tongue with deliberate difficulty or take pride in being called out for not knowing well the spoken language of the place they have spent all their lives in.

You can’t be ashamed of the lived experience of your own people or treat the passing down of local orature with contempt. You deprive only yourself of the intimacy of two worlds.