Karnataka’s linguistic diversity has always been mindboggling. Before it was reorganised along linguistic lines in 1956, the state was an extraordinary geopolitical space, occupied or ruled by several dynasties which spoke languages other than Kannada.
With several trade routes criss-crossing the region, most individuals were polyglot or at least bilingual. This historical legacy continues into the present, with surveys declaring Karnataka as one of the states with high linguistic diversity. Bengaluru, which has speakers of 107 languages, is the most diverse.
This diversity also includes dialects of Kannada from North Karnataka, Dakshina Kannada and Kalyana Karnataka, which can sometimes be unintelligible to other people from other parts of the state.
Urdu, Tamil and Telugu are also spoken by a sizeable number of people. But this apparent linguistic diversity pales in comparison to the number of ‘spoken’ languages sometimes known as mother tongues.
The People’s Linguistic Survey of Indian Languages (PLSI) in 2010, led by Ganesh Devy, lists 50 spoken languages which can be mapped on a scale with several lakh speakers to less than a thousand.
As Ganesh Devy, K V Narayana and other linguists argue, several tribal languages have been disappearing and with them, the unique worldview they embody.
In fact, the PSIL lists the Irula and Hakkipikki languages as seriously endangered.
Languages with a long written and literary tradition are more likely to survive the juggernaut of modernity and globalisation. The paradox is that while there are technologies that can document, preserve and disseminate all spoken languages, socio-economic factors are drastically reducing the actual number of language speakers.
The historical co-existence of many languages in Karnataka have greatly contributed to Kannada’s highly variegated vocabulary, though most of it exists only in speech.
People borrow and steal from many languages, even when pundits and grammarians impose esoteric rules of linguistic purity.
The numeral words in Kalyana Karnataka are of Marathi and Dakhani origin and North Karnataka dialect also uses them. Syntactic variations in Havyaka Kannada, Kundapura Kannada, Malnad Kannada are a linguistic delight, not to mention accents and phonological features.
The impact of languages coexisting is also seen in the names of objects of everyday culture.
However, rigid caste and social stratification has kept many tribal languages and mother tongues out of this rich and colourful exchange.
The institutions of modernity such as the nation, state, linguistic state, bureaucracy, the legal system have all negatively impacted linguistic diversity.
Most of us are now familiar with the acrimonious debates on national and state language. The creation of categories like classical language and scheduled language has created powerful hierarchies, while excluding other languages.
While administrative convenience calls for a single language, it unintentionally marginalises many other tongues. And a term like ‘state language’ often makes many other languages stateless.
A consequence of this has been the creation of a politics of language consciousness, which is always couched in cultural and at times, religious frameworks.
While this linguistic politics may succeed in securing state and public support for a language, it is always vulnerable to parochialism.
Mother tongue
Take the state support to Kannada language and cultural academies. While generous funding has helped, it has also opened up avenues for state interference, bringing corruption and attempts at ideological control.
But there are genuine questions surrounding linguistic diversity. Don’t we need a powerful politics of the people so languages don’t just survive as mere cultural ephemera?
Then there is the question of the medium of instruction in a multi-linguistic state.
The views of linguists, psychologists and thinkers ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Paulo Freire all say that every child should learn its mother tongue. But the state language is not necessarily the mother tongue of every child. Do we have the infrastructure, and importantly, the collective will to teach in all existing mother tongues?
The New Education Policy (NEP) makes an eloquent case about education in the mother tongue, though the move to make Kannada compulsory is already in the High Court.
Earlier, the Supreme Court already ruled that the medium of instruction and language is the parent’s choice (not the child’s). In the court case, the petitioner is Sanskrit which is no one’s mother tongue though a great language.
If we turn to the past without nostalgia, it appears as though linguistic diversity was not an insurmountable problem.
Sanskrit was the language of Shastric knowledge, Prakrits were the languages of the everyday world. Buddhism and Jainism chose the people’s language while the Vachanakaras chose Kannada.
A temple in Vijayanagara has inscriptions carved in four languages. Every great Kannada poet was bilingual. Kumaravyasa’s Gadugina Bharatha uses Persian and Dakhani words and hundreds of tatwapadakaras (poets who write metaphysical poems) wrote songs as code mixed texts.
Marathi and Persian were languages of administration, though the official Kannada was an esoteric hybridised register.
Dakshina Kannada has always been Tulunadu, with Konkani and Beary jostling for space.
So when did Karnataka’s worldview turn so narrow that linguistic diversity became a problem?
Everyone who loves Kannada should be vigilant and guard against it becoming hegemonic to the extent of threatening the smaller, spoken languages.
As Alur Venkatarao, the archpriest of Karnataka’s unification said, anyone who equates Karnataka only to Kannada is making a great error.