What is Wrong With Mixing Languages?
A number of people have approached me with complaints
about the mixing of languages i.e. Urdu with English or Punjabi words in Urdu
or, very often, Urdu and English words in Pashto and so on. Even very learned
writers, like I. Hassan (News 12
November), have called this phenomenon the ‘murder of two languages’. In
Balochistan there is much apprehension of Balochi and Brahvi having absorbed so
many Urdu words as to be in danger of becoming museum relics. In far away
Karakorum, because of the Karakorum highway, the language activists of Shina,
Burushaski and Wakhi complain of the phenomenal attack of Urdu and English words
on their language. In short, many people---and not just literary and linguistic
experts but ordinary educated people too---feel that their languages are being
rendered ‘impure’ by mixing them up with other languages. Teachers and parents
of students add to the complaints by saying that young people do not know any
language well. They expect the young to speak one language fluently at a time
and not to mix it up with any other. The young, of course, do not oblige their
seniors with much head-shaking and hard-wringing on both sides.
Let me first say that this phenomenon is not unique to Pakistan
nor is the purist reaction to it. British papers are full of complaints about
slang and American slang at that, being used by the young. Purists are alarmed
and schools are asked to take action. In the end everything fails and the slang
word either enters the English language or else it just goes out of fashion and
the young come up with another new word which sets off the purists screaming
yet again.
In France they are much more serious about the
contamination of the French language. They even make laws to forbid foreign
words from entering the lexicon. The French Academy actually decides which word
is officially French and which is not. Yet, in practice, French too receives
its dosage of slang and foreign words and has to put up with them---purists and
their laws notwithstanding.
The purist position is to freeze the language. For them
all change is contamination; all change is deterioration. This is
understandable if the language is a sacred language i.e. the language of sacred
texts and liturgical formulas. Indeed, it was to preserve the language of the
sacred texts that Panini, the great Sanskrit Grammarian, created a grammar containing
4000 rules of the language. Panini, who was born in Jahangira which is near the
Attock bridge and who taught at Taxila (Takshasila), effectively froze the
Sanskrit of what is now northern Pakistan. The languages of the living people
kept changing---absorbing words, changing meanings of words, changing
pronunciation, letting words become obsolete, creating new terms---till our
modern languages Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujrati, Bengali, Oriya, Hindi etc were
born.
The same thing happened to Latin. The grammatical rules
of Latin were codified by the 1st century B.C. But even this Latin had elements
of Greek as well as a number of dialects spoken near Rome. But Latin kept
changing as the Roman empire had people who spoke many languages. The change
was such that 3rd century A.D. Latin is called ‘Vulgar Latin’ (Vulgar = of the
common people). It is this Latin which the Roman Catholic Church adopted and codified in such texts as The Vulgate (St. Jerome’s translation of
the Bible A.D. 385-404). While the Latin of the Vatican, being a sacred
language, changed slowly and then stood still, ordinary Latin changed into
Romanee languages by the 9th century and now we see it as French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and so on.
The same thing happened to Arabic. Ibn-e-Khaldun
(1332-1400) calls change ‘corruption’ and there was fear that the meaning of
the holy texts of Islam would change if the language changed. Thus the rules of
classical Arabic were codified by Abul Aswad al Du’ ali who died in Basra. This
is classical Arabic. But, while all formal writing is done even now in
classical Arabic, the real spoken language of the common people kept changing.
That is why the spoken (or Demotic)
Arabic of Egypt is different from that of, say, Yemen or Iraq or Saudi
Arabia.
These were examples from sacred language in which change
is seen as being problematic because it changes the meanings of sacred texts.
As I said before, this anxiety is understandable and it is quite correct that
classical Sanskrit, Latin and Arabic are used for religious purposes without,
however, being the real, living mother tongues of living people.
What I am trying to suggest is that ordinary languages---English,
Urdu, Punjabi etc---do change and will continue to change. The purists should
not react to this change. They can do nothing much about it despite the
printing press, grammar books and dictionaries which do slow down the change.
One major reason for the change is contact with another
language. When this happens the language which is more powerful (i.e. which is
used in such domains of power as government, administration, judiciary,
commerce, education, media, military etc) affects the less powerful language.
The more powerful language is also more prestigious so people use it to
advertise their status of belonging to, or associating with, the domains of
power. Also, it is used for new concepts which are borrowed from the centres of
power. Moreover, it is taught in elitist institutions and some people are at
home in it. This was once the position of Persian which entered the language
which is called Urdu in Pakistan and Hindi in India. This South Asian language
did exist in the subcontinent before Persian entered it. It was not a mixture
of Persian, Turkish and some other languages. All languages are autonomous
codes of human communication as was the mother of Urdu and Hindi. Then came the
dominance of Persian and, quite naturally, it absorbed so many words from it as
to become almost a new language. Modern Hindi was deliberately made in the 19th
century by throwing out Persian words and putting Sanskrit ones in their place.
A similar process might have happened now had we not had
standardized Urdu as well as English. However, Urdu has absorbed English words
and Pakistani English has Urdu words. To deny this is to be a purist and not a
realist. To regularize the fact that Urdu has changed Professor Fateh Mohammad
Malik, Chairman of the National Language Authority, has authorized the
compilation of a new dictionary of words which are English in origin but are
used in Urdu (the present writer is part of the team which is doing this work).
I believe this is correct and should have been done a long time back.
As for mixing words. This is called ‘code switching’ in
the jargon of linguistics. In informal contexts it is natural and spontaneous.
Indeed, in bilingual societies it is unnatural to insist on speaking only one
language. First, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ language. All living
languages are mixtures. And, secondly, the mind of bilingual speakers functions
in precisely this way---it draws upon two sources of the vocabulary depending
on the situation, mood, intimacy between speakers and so on. South Asians would
be under great strain to speak in only one language. English-speaking South
Asians may lack the vocabulary for technical or learned words and thus may
switch to English. Even the illiterate will use the more familiar ‘time’ though
they can use ‘vaqt’. But as for car,
brake, accelerator, thermometer, bank, copy, tyre and hundreds of other
objects, institutions, processes and concepts borrowed from the West---there
simply are no easy indigenous equivalents. English works will be used just as
surely as American burgers will be eaten. This does not mean the young do not
know any language. It means they know more than one language.
To conclude, I suggest that the purists should stop
worrying about the eternally ongoing language-change which they are witnessing.
As code switching (mixing languages) is part of this language-change, they
should stop worrying about it too. Let everybody be spontaneous and natural and
this means thori Urdu mixed with
English and the other way around.
Dr. Tariq Rahman