Last month, a young linguist in Bhubaneswar asked me about the threat English can have on Odia. According to David Crystal, he told me, English is a “killer language”. The purport of his question was how we, as speakers of Odia and concerned about our language, should respond to this threat. 

Fifteen years ago at IIT Kanpur, two colleagues of mine had bitter exchanges on this issue at a conference, which was organised by my own department. One said politely that English was a killer language and there was the urgent need for us to do something by way of preserving our languages. The other said a little rudely that one must refrain from spreading such misinformation. The Indian languages are under no threat, whatever be the story of Australia and America, it is different in South Asia, he observed. 

Each expected me to support his stand but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to displease either but ended up displeasing both. So much for the practical advice that one must not speak unpleasant truth! But let me confess, I wasn’t sure what the truth was. 

In Bhubaneswar, of course, I could not have kept quiet because the person asking me the question was a young practitioner of the same discipline as mine, namely, linguistics. Besides, I was not as uninformed about this matter as I was at the time of that conference at IIT Kanpur. I somewhat disappointed him by saying that English was not a killer language, at least with respect to a large number of languages of the Indian sub-continent. We do not have to accept Crystal’s or any other authority’s views on faith. Besides, I am a little wary of the specialists’ pronouncements about public affairs. I feel there’s a bit of a hidden agenda there, although not always ill-intentioned. 

The English ruled India for 200 years. They introduced English and English education in our country. They were our language policy planners and implementers. We know that the introduction of English and English education was possible because of the important support by some influential Indians such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy. English was the language of administration and law and as expected, English empowered those who learnt the language well in economic, political and social terms. English became the language of opportunity. 

Quite a few Indians bought the idea of some (by no means all) colonial authorities, T.B. Macaulay in particular, that the knowledge, which was created in India in various fields in Sanskrit language was inferior to that created in England (more generally, Europe). 

Meaningful protest from India against this attitude came only around the time of the Independence movement, oversimplifying the matter. What is interesting to note is that in spite of all this, there is no clear evidence to the effect that Indian languages disappeared because of English. 

On the contrary, the major Indian languages used the interaction with English creatively to their own 
benefit. The expressive power of our languages increased, new forms of discourse emerged and our literatures flourished. Odia was no exception. In this context, it is worth noting that in Odisha, not just English but Sanskrit and Persian were the court language and used for scholarly and religious discourse for years in different periods. All these were languages of the upward social mobility. But despite the odds against it, Odia did not die. Rather literature flourished. Jagannath Dasa’s Bhagabata, composed in Odia in the sixteenth century, when it was the language of the common people, the non-elite, dealt a hard blow to the notion of inevitability of Sanskrit as the sole language of the sacred texts.

It was like displacing Sanskrit from a domain where it had no competition from any language. Can we derive inspiration from this today in the context of English?

Incidentally, the Christian missionaries preached Christianity in India for purposes of conversion, in the respective languages of the target groups, and not in English. Some missionaries wrote the first dictionaries and the first grammatical descriptions of some of our languages, including Odia. 

When they translated the Bible into our languages, they gave us very probably our first inter-cultural translations. Even in this domain of cultural intervention, English came as no threat to our languages. Those people in our country who converted to Christianity did not shift to English. Even in those states where English is the official language, native tongue has not perished on that account. 

Those languages in our country which are said to be under the threat of extinction have few speakers and as Jatindra Nayak, academic and author of Utkal University, rightly observes, have no written form on account of which these cannot be used for education at any stage. In any case, since a language’s death is, to a significant extent, due to language shift, the social and educational conditions under which such shift has taken place or is most likely to take place in the case of our languages, needs to be studied carefully. 

My feeling is that more shifts have taken place from dialects to the relevant regional languages than to English in our country. This has remained unnoticed because the discourse of language endangerment is about languages, not dialects, which are nothing but potential languages. 

In my opinion, the threat to Odia from English isn’t real. However, it is not that Odia does not need enrichment merely because a 2,000-year-old language with a rich literary tradition simply cannot disappear. Our language has to become the language of knowledge, including knowledge of technical fields, and of economic opportunity. We have to make it happen, otherwise we will have no option but to depend on other languages to respond to our needs in a society. We do not need to blame other languages for the lack of knowledge discourses in our language. That will only give us the negative satisfaction of becoming victims.

(The author is a linguist and former professor of the department of humanities, IIT, Kanpur)