Language movements outside of Europe
Those in Ireland who aren’t very interested in the Irish language often opine that immigrants can’t understand why there should be an Irish language revival movement. They seem to believe that the peoples of the developing world are so destitute and starving that they have no time for anything that goes beyond finding food to live to see another day, and thus have a practical approach even to the question of language. In reality, though, language movements are found all over the world, even in the poorest countries.
When it comes to Africa, we can hardly forget the name Suleyman Kante, who was born in Guinea, speaking the Manding language – one of the Mande dialects that are widely spoken in west Africa, and are so similar to each other that they can use a common literary language.
When Kante was growing up, educated people in the Mande-speaking region did not appreciate these languages very much, even in the region where they are spoken, and those who did speak them natively thought it more important to learn big European languages, or even Arabic because it was the language of the Qur’an. Kante himself was a Muslim and could read the Qur’an in the original language (actually, he himself ran a madrasa, a Qur’an reading school).
Kante was deeply troubled about the future of Mande languages, and in the end he worked out his own alphabet and standardised language for them – the N’Ko system, from a word that means ‘I say’ in these languages. Today N’Ko is a vigorous cultural movement in west Africa, and Suleiman Kante himself is to be lauded as one of the great heroes of Africa. What he accomplished is a task that even trained linguists would hesitate to try their hand at.
Language matters in a crucial way even outside Europe. It played an important part in the struggle for the freedom of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. Curiously enough, Pakistan itself is a country where only a small percentage are native speakers of the official language, Urdu. There are lots of other languages spoken in Pakistan, most of them being Indo-European such as Punjabi, Pashtu, or Baluchi. Probably many people were quite satisfied having Urdu as a lingua franca, a language of mutual communication, for all the different tribes of West Pakistan. So, if there were language troubles in West Pakistan, they never were serious enough to tear the country apart. East Pakistan was another story, because there the vernacular language is Bangla.
East Pakistanis were dissatisfied with their language not having official status, and a language movement came about in the beginning of the 1950s to acquire more recognition for Bangla. It is a well-established cultural language, and one of the most widely spoken languages of the world in terms of numbers, and thus it is no wonder that East Pakistan students in particular were willing to put up a fight for the sake of the language.
On 21 February, 1952, students protested publicly, demanding official recognition for Bangla, and many of them died when police suppressed the demonstration with brutality. Today, the languages of the world are celebrated on 21 February, the International Mother Tongue Day, to honour those who were killed on that day.
In that part of the world even other language movements are found, of course. The central north of India is known as the ‘Hindi Belt’, because Hindi and related varieties are widely spoken there. However, if we move across northern India to the east, we will find the local vernaculars becoming more and more like Bangla, and there are a lot of languages there in between these two. In the state of Bihar, for example, there are three major languages quite closely related to each other, called Maithili, Bhojpuri, and Magahi, and as they are so similar to each other they are often lumped together as Bihari.
These languages have their own literary tradition, especially Maithili. But when India became independent, the local languages were not given official recognition in the state of Bihar. This was reserved for Hindi, because authorities saw Bihari basically as a Hindi dialect. Maithili speakers were not satisfied with this, and consequently a language movement started to demand official status for Maithili in Bihar. Today Maithili is basically official in the state, but the regional government still conducts its affairs mostly in Hindi. You could say that Maithili has in Bihar the status Irish has in Ireland, that of an ‘ancestral’ language, even though it is the native language of some thirty million people.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
