Bibek Debroy: Let us teach Sylheti

OFF THE RECORD

Since I didn't have any luggage, I decided to save money in Paris and took the RER (Reseau Express Regional) from the airport. There is a big difference between the 9 euros of RER and 70-plus euros of a cab. Early in the morning, the compartment was deserted. It was still dark outside. The three or four people in the compartment were dozing. Suddenly, I perked up. The silence was broken by an elderly man speaking rather loudly into his mobile. The language sounded familiar. It was Bengali and yet it wasn't. There are formal definitions of language. Bengali is a language. What I was hearing was at best a dialect. It was Sylheti. Sylhet is in the Surma valley of Bangladesh and is the land of tea plantations, thus known as the land of two leaves and a bud. Just to the north of Sylhet is Meghalaya and just to the south is Tripura. There are plenty of people from Sylhet (Bangladesh) one encounters overseas, particularly in the restaurant business, but they rarely speak such classic Sylheti any more. Sylhetis in both Bangladesh and India have integrated language-wise and become mainstreamed. Those who are in India migrated just before and after Independence and that generation always had a chip on its shoulder about whether Sylhet shouldn't have been part of India.

But that's history. Because of geographical proximity, the migration took place to Meghalaya, Tripura, and Assam""what was then greater Assam. Since that was where I grew up, I heard Sylheti all the time and it was surprising that I could still understand it after so many years. This old gentleman, from Bangladesh, had gone to pick someone up from the airport and that relative had failed to turn up. That was the purport of the conversation. Should one bemoan the demise of Sylheti as a dialect? Defining culture is a difficult task and all such definitions tend to bring in language. Unesco has definitions of extinct, possibly-extinct, nearly-extinct, seriously-endangered, endangered and potentially-endangered languages. How many languages are there? The answer seems unclear and the figure varies between 3,000 and 8,000, with Unesco opting for around 6,000, since 6,000 languages have registered population figures associated with them. Fifty-two per cent of these languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people (28 per cent are spoken by less than 1,000), so one can presume they are in some danger of extinction. Ninety-six per cent of the world's population speak 4 per cent of languages and 90 per cent of languages are not represented on the Net.

The Bible (Genesis 11:1-9) springs to mind. "And the Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech'." Clearly, this confusion is becoming less and a homogenisation of languages is taking place. One only obtains an imperfect understanding of this if one looks at data on the world's most important languages. The top 10 are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, and Wu, with Arabic not figuring in this list because it is not counted as a single language. However, this list is misleading because it is based on first languages or mother tongues and not on second languages. As with the composition of the Security Council, the UN's official languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic) have little bearing on the importance of languages today. Both French and Russian are largely irrelevant. Even if one doesn't have data, if second languages are included, it is more or less certain that English will be the most commonly spoken language today.

Rather oddly, if English has survived and prospered, it is because of colonies. Amartya Sen has recently reminded us of the obvious. We have multiple identities and focusing on one facet (religion) at the expense of others is dangerous and misleading. Samuel Huntington could also have worked out a plausible clash of civilisations based on whether we eat with our fingers, or use chopsticks or cutlery. Cross-country regressions on explanations of growth being what they are, cutlery users will out-perform chopstick-users and chopstick-users will out-perform finger-users. Similarly, English colonies are certain to out-perform Spanish, Portuguese or French ones. To get back to the point, if English is becoming the standardised global language, why are we so reticent to tap our comparative advantage there, when China is making special efforts to build up English-language expertise? Contrary to what we may think, the English-speaking segment of the Indian population is not less than 5 per cent. A recent finance ministry database shows, at least in self-perceptions, 30 per cent of the young population believe it is conversant with spoken English. And this is courtesy private schools, not government schools, threat to mother tongues and culture being symptomatic of government schools and policy. As if facilities with English and the mother tongue are contradictory. Since we often believe they are, we must preserve Sylheti. Although the person who spoke it was at least 65, not 25.