Language, for me, is just a medium of communication. Its beauties are to be enjoyed. It should not be used as a weapon to fight unwarranted battles. But, throughout history, after man created languages, he is fighting over them. Just like the saying, ‘The biggest enemy of global peace is patriotism’, ‘Love of one’s mother tongue’ is again an enemy of peace, not necessarily among countries but within communities inside a country. If it is not so, we would not have seen wars between French and English, English and Spaniards, French and Germans, Germans and Austrians, Czheks and Slovaks, Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Christians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Tamils and Hindi-speaking, Malayalees and Tamils, Kannadigas and Tamils, Kannadigas and Marathis, Marathis and Konkanis, Japanese and Chinese. The list seems to be endless.
What provoked me to write this blog was a casual remark by a friend that there was no language like Tamil which could express humour in so many ways and so beautifully. This sort of a feeling is harboured by almost every one. Even those who do not have script for their mother tongue – they are just dialects, they express similar thoughts. Another friend of mine remarked that Hindi had all the pronunciations in the world. Having learnt about 7 languages so far in my life, my strongest belief is that no language is superior to another. Each one has its beauties and its limitations. If one starts listing out the limitations, one is ostracized. Tamil being my mother tongue and English being the second language I learnt as a child, my love for these two is immense but that does not border on chauvinism. I can boldly say that these two are not phonetic languages just like any language which has Sanskrit as a base like Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. In the latter set, we speak as we write and write as we speak. They can accommodate most of the pronunciations one normally encounters. This is not the case with many other languages like Tamil and English because the alphabets of these languages are a very small set. This is not to belittle these two languages. Over ages, people have invented new letters or new styles to express words from other languages. Each language is almost complete to express the needs of its people but only when it interacts with other languages does the trouble arise. Here historically, the person ruling over others has imposed his language specialties on his subjects and the subjects have willingly or unwillingly accepted. Thus we had Urdu language, for example when Persian could not be completely spread here.
I love all the languages I am fortunate to learn. But the so called lovers or protectors of languages like Tamil or Hindi or Marathi, are simply not worried about the degeneration that has been introduced by the TV or video or radio jockeys. Language is being used to make a livelihood by provoking people.