Language Log

"Fading Language"?

December 23, 2022 @ 8:21 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Ignorance of linguistics

People get confused about languages, dialects, registers, and scripts — and when journalists try to help, they often make things worse. For a good recent example, see Mujib Mashal, "Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds", NYT 12/18/2022:

That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism — often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma — played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.

In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.

In "Scripts, Scriptures and Scribes" (1/3/2008) I quoted from Bob King's 2001 paper "The poisonous potency of script: Hindi and Urdu":

Hindi and Urdu are variants of the same language characterized by extreme digraphia: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right, Urdu in a script derived from a Persian modification of Arabic script written from right to left. High variants of Hindi look to Sanskrit for inspiration and linguistic enrichment, high variants of Urdu to Persian and Arabic. Hindi and Urdu diverge from each other cumulatively, mostly in vocabulary, as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms, and in their highest — and therefore most artificial — forms the two languages are mutually incomprehensible. The battle between Hindi and Urdu, the graphemic conflict in particular, was a major flash point of Hindu/Muslim animosity before the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947.

[…]

There is a prodigal visual difference between the Devanagari script (also called Nagari) used to write Hindi and the Perso-Arabic script ordinarily used to write Urdu. The Devanagari script of Hindi is"squarish," "chunky," "has edges" — conventional characterizations all — written left to right, with words set off from each other by an overhead horizontal line connected to the graphemes and running from the beginning of the word to its end. The Perso-Arabic script of Urdu is "graceful," "flowing," "has curves," written right to left, with word boundaries marked as much by final forms of consonants as by spaces. The immediate visually iconic associations are: Hindi script = India, South Asia, Hinduism; Urdu script = Middle East, Islam. The graphemic difference between Hindi and Urdu is far more dramatic, for example, than the difference between the Cyrillic script of Serbian and the Roman script of Croatian.

[…]

One can easily imagine a condition of pacific digraphia: people who speak more or less the same language choose for perfectly benevolent reasons to write their language differently; but these people otherwise like each other, get on with one another, live together as amiable neighbors. It is a homey picture, and one wishes it were the norm. It is not. Digraphia is regularly an outer and visible sign of ethnic or religious hatred. Script tolerance, alas, is no more common than tolerance itself. In this too Hindi-Urdu is lamentably all too typical. People have died in India for the Devanagari script of Hindi or the Perso-Arabic script of Urdu. It is rare, except for scholars, for Hindi speakers to learn to read Urdu script or for Urdu speakers to learn to read Devanagari.

But the various common spoken forms of "Hindi" and "Urdu" overlap to such a great extent that the dialogue and song lyrics in Bollywood movies live mostly in the shared space. This has led to some controversy — see e.g. "Language in Bollywood: Hindi or Urdu?".

That last reference features this illustration of a line from the movie performance of a popular Bollywood song, "Chaiyya Chaiyya":

The full song, from the 1998 movie Dil Se, can be found in several versions on YouTube, including this one (posted 9 months ago and viewed 23 million times):

The lyrics page on genius.com for this song is presented in Latin script, where the cited couplet (at about 1:27 in the video above, or here with English subtitles) is rendered as

[Pre/Post Chorus: Sukhwinder Singh & Sapna Awasthi]
Wo yaar hai jo khushboo ki tarah
Wo jiski zubaan urdu ki tarah

Genius also offers a "Hindi version", in which the relevant lines are rendered as

[Pre/Post Chorus: Sukhwinder Singh & Sapna Awasthi]
वो यार है जो ख़ुशबू की तरह
जिसकी जुबां उर्दू की तरह

for which Google Translate produces the (semi-mangled) English version

He is the friend who is like the fragrance
whose tongue like urdu

(Readers familiar with Bollywood Urdu/Hindi are invited to offer better translations and explications…)

There does not seem to be a version in Urdu script (whether Nastiliq or Naskh) — which I guess illustrates the meta-sociolinguistic problem we started with.

And for a bit more on Urdu script(s), see "Is the Urdu script on the verge of dying?", 6/29/2014, which references Ali Eteraz's 10/7/2013 "The Death of the Urdu Script", focused on digital Urdu text around the world.

December 23, 2022 @ 8:21 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Ignorance of linguistics

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13 Comments

J.W. Brewer said,

December 23, 2022 @ 8:45 am

The overlap of the commonly-spoken variants of "Hindi" and "Urdu" is a common-place observation, but the flip-side of that observation is that the "official" literary-standard versions of Hindi and Urdu are rather more divergent from each other and indeed the respective standards may have to some extent (for cultural/political reasons) evolved in order to maximize that divergence/contrast. So all of the Bollywood stuff is not inconsistent with a narrative that high-falutin' literary-standard Urdu (which presumably would be prescriptively inflicted on students in Indian schools with Urdu as the official language of instruction) is in decline compared to various earlier time periods.

Whether the stadium-filling poetry was primarily composed in the literary-standard register or the Bollywood-demotic register is unknown to me, and I don't have the energy this morning to evade the NYT paywall to see if the full article clarifies that, especially given myl's suggestion that the writer doesn't really understand the situation.

The "Why do Hindutva backers hate it" piece that is also linked to lends up giving a lot of interesting and useful history, although the basic question "why would a nationalist movement dislike a language variety that was developed and promoted by those who collaborated with the foreign occupiers of the country, whether Mughal or British" should not be a particularly puzzling one.
Victor Mair said,

December 23, 2022 @ 9:21 am

"Diglossia and digraphia in Guoyu-Putonghua and in Hindi-Urdu" (1/1/12)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3676
Taylor, Philip said,

December 23, 2022 @ 9:26 am

I managed to capture quite a lot, JWB, before the "you've read your quota" pop-up kicked in — perhaps the following may provide you with further insights :

The inaugural day of the Urdu poetry festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in New Delhi this month.

Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds

That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

The inaugural day of the Urdu poetry festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in New Delhi this month. Credit…

By Mujib Mashal

Photographs and Video by Saumya Khandelwal

Mujib Mashal and Saumya Khandelwal attended the Jashn-e-Rekhta poetry festival in New Delhi to report this story.

Dec. 18, 2022

The four designated stages inside the crowded stadium complex in the heart of the busy capital weren’t enough. So the poetry lovers also took to the footpaths and the spaces in between, turning them into impromptu open-mic platforms for India’s embattled language of love.

In one corner of the festival grounds, which had been draped in vibrant colors and calligraphy, a group of university students alternated between singing popular romantic songs, backed by a young man on guitar, and jostling to recite verses of their own.

“In your love,” one young poet began, leaning into the huddle with confidence, before forgetting the rest of his verse. “In your love ….” he repeated, unable to recall.

“Don’t worry,” someone from the crowd encouraged him, as the others chuckled. “In love, we all forget.”

In another corner, Pradeep Sahil, a poet and lyricist, handed his phone to a friend to record him as he placed a red chair at a busy spot and took a seat, crossing his legs and reading poem after poem. A crowd soon gathered, cheering after every verse. With no room on the main stage, Mr. Sahil had found a stage of his own, climbing atop his chair and reciting what felt like his entire book.

The times have changed, and so has the poet

I am half a businessman now, half a poet.

That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism — often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma — played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.

In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.

“In our effort to get on the gravy train, we left a lot behind on the platform,” Javed Akhtar, a prominent poet and lyricist, said at the festival. “And among those things we forgot on the platform was literature, language, poetry and other arts.”

Yet Urdu has remained the key language of romantic expression in the songs and cinema that saturate Indian life. Generations, in India as well as across the wider subcontinent and in the diaspora, have grown up humming songs from Bollywood musicals that draw heavily on Urdu poetry. Knowingly or unknowingly, Urdu has been their language of angst, heartbreak and celebration.

Urdu is a composite language. Its grammar and syntax are indigenous to India, but it draws its script — and a heavy share of its vocabulary — from Persian and Arabic influences that came on the back of Muslim invasions. The rich tradition of poetry, music and art that developed from this confluence became known as the Ganga-Jamuna culture, a meeting of the two great rivers with those names.

After Pakistan adopted Urdu as its national language with the bloody partition of India in 1947, the tongue increasingly took on an Islamic identity in India — a marginalization that has only intensified with the recent rise of the Hindu right. The governing party’s right-wing support base has long focused on “purifying” Indian culture, with the only acceptable confluence one in which it subsumes other streams.

The poetry festival, known as Jashn-e-Rekhta, which was in its seventh edition, is part of a decade-old effort to bridge the gap between the language’s wide emotional connection and its receding accessibility.
Video
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Audience members responding to a poem by Shakeel Azmi. “An ornate cap, a well-shaped braid — but without humanity, no head is complete.”CreditCredit…Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times

It all began in 2013 with a website, Rekhta.org, started by Sanjiv Saraf, an engineer and businessman who was a lifelong lover of music set to Urdu poetry and had just begun learning the script at age 53.

He wanted to make a small number of good Urdu poems accessible by presenting each in three different scripts — in the original Urdu; in Devanagari, the script of Hindi; and in English transliteration. Readers could click on any word to get a pop-up of its meaning.

Mr. Saraf’s organization, the Rekhta Foundation, has since expanded its mission to reviving the Urdu language. Dozens of its employees travel around India to scan and archive works from old libraries and private collections, making out-of-print Urdu books available digitally. The Rekhta website now has about 20 million users annually, two-thirds of them under 35. The site has so far made available more than 120,000 pieces of work by over 6,000 poets.

In many ways, Urdu’s poetic tradition gives it an advantage in the era of social media and short attention spans. The building block of much of Urdu poetry is a simple “sher” — two versed lines in which the first sets up an idea and the second completes it.

“The emotional power of this language — to express the deepest emotions in the shortest possible construct,” Mr. Saraf said, “you cannot help but fall in love with the language.”

The poetry festival was held for the first time since the pandemic, and there was an undertone about the fragility of life. The singer Hariharan captivated the audience with a slow meditation on life taken from a poem by Muzaffar Warsi.

To make it or to break it, it takes no time,

Life is but a house of dew on the petals of a flower.

Among the crowd that spilled out of the large tent where Hariharan performed was Snigdha Kar, an environmentalist, and her 7-year-old daughter, Shreyashri. As the singer dwelled on one line of poetry, repeating it over and over, Ms. Kar closed her eyes, letting the notes sink in.

Music and poetry provide a moment of grounding in a fast-moving world of work, travel and family obligations, she said. While Ms. Kar said she had always been moved by lyrics and poetry — “I used to pay attention to the words more,” she said — she has started classical lessons online during the pandemic to understand the music, too.

“I also bought a guitar,” she said, adding with a sheepish smile: “You know, classical music could become boring sometimes.”

The festival’s main attraction was the poetry sessions, from open-mic opportunities where budding poets nervously recited their works, trying to stick to meter and rhyme, to master classes that encouraged them to keep composing even if they were struggling with the basics of Urdu script or form.

“Poetry is not just arranging words,” the poet Suhail Azad, who took early retirement as a police officer to focus full time on poetry, told attendants of one master class. “If it reaches the heart, it is poetry.”

At the festival’s headline poetry recital, the mushaira, half a dozen senior poets took their seats on the stage, enchanting the audience in distinct styles, often to standing ovations.

Some of the poets sang their verses like melodious songs. Others, like Shakeel Azmi, brought the same dynamism as a stage performer — moving away from the lectern, building up the suspense of the second verse by repeating the first over and over.

Open your wings, the people are watching your flight

Sitting on the ground, why are you staring at the sky?

The more senior poets, like Fahmi Badayuni, 70, brought the quiet swagger and simplicity of a bygone era, both in demeanor and verse.

Before he recited his work, Mr. Badayuni — wearing a pink sweater, fur hat and checkered scarf — acknowledged the audience’s connection with his art by noting that his poems had gone “viral.”

Those who are unaware of your scent

They make do with flowers.

The crowd roared after every verse, many standing to shout “once more!” The master of ceremonies stopped Mr. Badayuni to offer an observation: His verses were so good that people were also whistling in appreciation.

“Keep whistling like that, brother, and you may get a job in the railways,” the M.C. joked with the crowd.

Mr. Badayuni then went back to reciting another sher. He repeated the first line to the audience’s attentive silence and curiosity, and then landed its kicker to their eruption.

I keep reading it, day and night,

the letter that she never wrote.
Philip Anderson said,

December 23, 2022 @ 10:54 am

@J.W. Brewer
A question that refers to “those who collaborated with the foreign occupiers of the country” is far from neutral, and it’s pretty obvious what the questioner’s viewpoint is!
Sally Thomason said,

December 23, 2022 @ 12:15 pm

Muslim families in India who send their children to Hindi-medium schools, where the kids learn to write in Devanagari, often do worry about having traditional Urdu cultural writings being inaccessible to the younger generation. One (indirect?) result of this cultural concern, according to Rizwan Ahmad in his 2007 University of Michigan dissertation Shifting Dunes: Changing Meanings of Urdu in India, is that a few orthographic changes have been made to Devanagari as used in this community to reflect Urdu usage: that is, there's a new Muslim variant of the writing system as used by Indian Muslims.
David Marjanović said,

December 23, 2022 @ 1:09 pm

the Cyrillic script of Serbian and the Roman script of Croatian

They're effectively different fonts for the same alphabet, but keep in mind that both are in active use in Serbia, pretty much at random. If you stand in a street in Belgrade or Niš and you can read only one, you're illiterate.
Colin Danby said,

December 23, 2022 @ 3:46 pm

@Brewer: We are communicating right now in a language that's the product of multiple imperial conquests. Your description is unpardonably tendentious. Urdu is spoken by at least 50 million Indians.
Julian said,

December 23, 2022 @ 4:26 pm

'I keep reading it, day and night.
the letter that she never wrote.'

Nice to see that some things transcend ethnic or cultural tensions, anyway.
J.W. Brewer said,

December 23, 2022 @ 8:28 pm

To be clear, I am not necessarily endorsing the Hindutva-enthusiast framing of the historical situation – I'm just saying that a negative view of Urdu flows pretty obviously from that framing of the situation, such that no one should profess to be puzzled by the conclusion that follows from the premises. Maybe the Brits should have stuck with Persian proper as the language of administration for those who couldn't be arsed to learn English, in order to stay more aloof from local tribal rivalries. Or maybe they should have resisted the pressure from various local factions to split up Hindustani (maybe it was still Hindoostanee back then?) into separate soi-disant "languages" with factional affiliations.
J.W. Brewer said,

December 23, 2022 @ 8:34 pm

@David M.: But I take it that there's an asymmetry these days, such that you can be reasonably functional in Croatia w/o being able to read a Cyrillic transliteration of your L1 yet you can't function so well in Serbia (or Montenegro) w/o being able to read a Latinized transliteration of your L1? I am FWIW told that within Montenegro (not a very large place) there is significant regional variation in the ratio of the two scripts to each other in public signage and that that variation correlates fairly well with voting patterns.
Chester Draws said,

December 25, 2022 @ 7:16 pm

Surely if you know a language to fluency you can learn to read it in another alphabet pretty quickly? My wife was able to start reading signs in Cyrillic within days of starting to travel in Eastern Europe, and that was in languages we didn't know.

It takes mere seconds to adjust to a difficult font, as Germans who have to read the ghastly "Fraktur" know.

And the direction of writing is the least of one's worries, as learning to read upside down shows (although the habits of a lifetime about which way to turn the pages of a book are harder to break).

Even minor orthographic differences are simply learned, just as alternative spellings in US and UK cause only minor grief.

So the idea that a person who learns to read in a Hindi writing variant won't be able to operate in an Urdu written environment if they chose to make the change strikes me as unlikely.
Vanya said,

December 25, 2022 @ 8:04 pm

you can't function so well in Serbia (or Montenegro) w/o being able to read a Latinized transliteration of your L1?

My impression working in Vojvodina and Belgrade is that Cyrillic is increasingly peripheral in every day Serbian life. The language of advertising and business is almost always written in Latin script. Cyrillic may be slowly facing the same fate as Fraktur in German – perceived by a younger generation as an old fashioned font with some unpleasant nationalistic overtones.
Barbara Phillips Long said,

December 26, 2022 @ 3:03 am

For more on the politics of language in India, see this article about how languages used by large numbers of Indians are disadvantaged in relation to Hindi, particularly by the current ruling party:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/25/threat-unity-anger-over-push-make-hindi-national-language-of-india

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"Fading Language"?

13 Comments

J.W. Brewer said,

Victor Mair said,

Taylor, Philip said,

Philip Anderson said,

Sally Thomason said,

David Marjanović said,

Colin Danby said,

Julian said,

J.W. Brewer said,

J.W. Brewer said,

Chester Draws said,

Vanya said,

Barbara Phillips Long said,

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