Language is what makes us human. It is how people communicate. By learning a language, it means you have mastered a complex system of words, structure, and grammar to effectively communicate with others. To most people, language comes naturally.
We learn how to communicate even before we can talk and as we grow older, we find ways to manipulate language to truly convey what we want to say with words and complex sentences.
Of course, not all communication is through language, but mastering a language certainly helps speed up the process. This is one of the many reasons why language is important.
Language is one of the most important parts of any culture. It is the way by which people communicate with one another, build relationships, and create a sense of community. There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today, and each is unique in a number of ways.
Communication is the core component of any society, and language is an important aspect of that.
As language began to develop, different cultural communities put together collective understandings through sounds. Over time, these sounds and their implied meanings became commonplace and language was formed.
Intercultural communication is a symbolic process whereby social reality is constructed, maintained, repaired and transformed. As people with different cultural backgrounds interact, one of the most difficult barriers they face is that of language.
Language is an indispensable component of the culture of a nation or people. Language, rather culture, make the identity of a nation. The value systems of western society are different from the eastern society. Values are so deep rooted in societies that it is difficult to isolate or destabilize them.
The identity of Kashmiri people is their language, Kashur. Kashmiri is the mother tongue of more than one crore people of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmiri is the language that is blossomed with one of the richest literatures in India.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has advocated that the medium of instruction is home language/mother tongue /local language/regional language for schools, until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond.
All students will learn three languages in their school under the ‘formula’. Mother tongue use in worship is very essential in communicating the gospel to the deepest level.
About Kashmir and its core language, a recent entrant into the list of the official languages of Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmiri is a language from the Dardic subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by about 50 % of the population of Jammu and Kashmir region.
Around 7 million Kashmiris in the Kashmir region speak this language, and it is among the 22 scheduled languages of India. Kashmiri is considered as one of the oldest languages used in the Indian subcontinent. It is widely considered as a Sanskrit language which sounds valid considering the fact that before its conversion to Islam, most of the Kashmir Valley was inhabited by Brahmins.
Kashmiri literature is as old as 750 years; this is the age of the emergence of many modern languages’ literatures such as English. It is one of the oldest spoken languages of India and the constitution of India has recognized it as an official language under Schedule-VIII.
The Kashmiri language has uniqueness of secularism and delicacy of communal harmony. It has the spiritual poetry of Nund Reshi and Lalleshwari (Lal Ded) which is brimmed with mysticism in effect and a true philosophy of life for all irrespective of region or religion.
Indo-European language family is native to western and southern Eurasia, consisting of languages of Europe, northern Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau. One of the branches of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian.
Indo-Aryan languages, also called Indic languages, are a branch of Indo-Iranian languages. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by more than 800 million people, mainly in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal. There are more than 200 known Indo-Aryan languages. Dardic is a subgroup of these languages.
Dardic languages are spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, some parts of Afghanistan, and in the Kashmir Valley and Chenab Valley in India. Kashmiri, Shina, Chitral, Kohistani, Pashayi and Kunar are the subfamilies of Dardic languages. The Kashmiri subfamily includes the languages Kashmiri, Kishtwari and Poguli.
Sanskrit influences can be easily seen in Kashmiri. When Muslims ruled Kashmir, the Kashmiri language borrowed many Persian words. In the recent years, Hindustani and Punjabi have influenced Kashmiri vocabulary. Three scripts are used in Kashmiri.
They include Perso-Arabic, Devanagari and Sharada. Roman script is also sometimes used. Since the 8th century AD, Kashmiri was written in the Sharada script. This script is not used today, except for religious ceremonies of Kashmiri Pandits.
Today, Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts are used, wherein Perso-Arabic is recognized as the official script of the Kashmiri language and it is used by Kashmiri Hindus and Kashmiri Muslims alike. Unlike other Indo-Aryan languages, many old features of the Old Indo-Aryan have been retained in the Kashmiri language.
Kashmiri has two dialects, namely, Kishtwari and Pogali. Kishtwai is a conservative dialect, used mostly in the Kishtwar Valley. Pogali is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in some parts of Jammu, and is intermediate between Kashmiri and Western Pahari.
Thus, we can see that Kashmiri is a very old and a rich language having its own unique characteristics due to which it stands out from other languages. Spoken by a majority of people in Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmiri got the special status of official language of Jammu and Kashmir in 2020. This decision was greeted by Kashmiris all across the world over and has served as an important step in promoting this language.
When one develops an interest in the Kashmiri language one is tempted to delve deep into history in order to get to know the origins of this ancient language. Least research rather scientific research is conducted and only few commentaries are provided in this direction to provide an empirical treatise with an inquisitive insight on the origin and development of Kashmiri language. The perspectives regarding the discourse of ‘power and language’, which George Orwell explicitly describes in ‘Power and English Language’, in case of Kashmiri language are naive if not absent.
Professor Rehman Rahi, a celebrated Kashmiri poet who devoted his life to promoting and preserving the Kashmiri language and gave its poetry a distinct identity, published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose in Kashmiri and is credited with restoring the language spoken by more than six million people to the realm of literature, lifting it out of the shadow of Persian and Urdu, which once dominated the literary scene in Kashmir.
In the 1950s, he attended a poetry reading session in the village of Raithan in central Kashmir, where a Kashmiri poem was greeted with tremendous applause. Rahi then went onstage and read his work in Urdu, then the region’s official language. That was the beginning of his long love affair with the language, which he described in his 1966 poem “Hymn to a Language”. He also promoted Kashmiri in more concrete ways. He was one of the biggest supporters of a campaign to restore the language to schools, an effort that finally succeeded in 2000. He helped recruit teachers and scholars to teach Kashmiri and created a course to teach it to children.
The evolution of its script and development of Kashmiri language is an important and interesting area of study. The role played by Sufis and Rishis in the development of Kashmiri language is also exemplary and must be documented.
(The author is a regular contributor. )
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.