A Linguistic Tour of the Indian Subcontinent
Rohan Rajesh
The fact that the Indian subcontinent is a diverse land is well-known. Every major religion has a presence in the subcontinent, and each region has multiple ethnic groups with their own food, culture, literary traditions, etc. But many countries have this type of diversity, and globalization and migration are only increasing their heterogeneity. What sets the Indian subcontinent apart is language. The sheer scale of the subcontinent’s linguistic diversity makes one question how these countries have managed to stay together. Indeed, almost all of the subcontinent’s countries have faced linguistic strife, whether it be demands for recognition and statehood to separatism and civil war. Nonetheless, linguistic diversity, when well-managed, is great not only for that country but the world. To understand these issues, let us take a linguistic tour of the Indian subcontinent.
First, we need to understand the concept of language families. Just as related species can be grouped into families (ex: Felidae is the family of cats), related languages are grouped into language families. The largest language family in the world is the Indo-European language family, with more than 3.2 billion native speakers. This family includes most of the languages of Europe (including English), Iran, and the north of the Indian subcontinent. The Indo-European family is also far larger than the second-largest family – the Sino-Tibetan language family – which includes most languages spoken in China, Tibet, and Myanmar and has around 1.4 billion native speakers.
To understand the subcontinent’s linguistic diversity, let us compare it to Europe. The vast majority of Europeans speak Indo-European languages. These include speakers of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Greek, Armenian, Romani, etc. There are also significant populations who speak Uralic and Turkic languages. Uralic languages in Europe include Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian. The Turkic languages in Europe include Turkish and Azerbaijani (which is considered by some to be a dialect of Turkish). There are also languages spoken by a relatively small population, including Maltese (a Semitic language descended from Arabic), Basque, and the various languages of the Caucasus region, like Georgian, Chechen, etc. Basque is interesting because it is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any known language family.
Like Europe, the majority of the Indian subcontinent speaks Indo-European languages. However, unlike in Europe, Indo-European languages face stiffer competition from speakers of Dravidian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Austroasiatic languages, and Kra-Dai languages. In the subcontinent, the languages of the Indo-European family are largely in the Indo-Iranian sub-family (which, by a number of languages, is the largest branch of the Indo-European family). That subfamily mostly includes Indic languages descended from Sanskrit (ex: Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Nepali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Dhivehi, etc.) and Iranian languages (ex: Pashto and Balochi). With the exception of Sinhalese (the dominant language in Sri Lanka) and Dhivehi (the dominant language of the Maldives), most of these languages are concentrated in the northern part of the subcontinent.
Dravidian languages dominate in South India. These include classical languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) and several tribal languages like the phonetically fascinating Toda language. Bucking this geographic trend is the Brahui language, a Dravidian language spoken in Baluchistan, in the northwest part of the subcontinent in western Pakistan. There are also pockets of Dravidian languages spoken in eastern India.
Speakers of Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, and Kra-Dai languages consist of around 3% of the subcontinent, but given the subcontinent’s large population, that is around 40 million people. The Sino-Tibetan languages are mostly spoken in the Himalayan region and the northeast of India. They include Tibetan, Dzongkha (the predominant language of Bhutan), Ladakhi, Balti, Sikkimese, Boro, and Kokborok, among many others. The subcontinent’s Austroasiatic languages are predominantly spoken in the east and northeast of the subcontinent and are related to Vietnamese and Khmer. In India, Santali and Khasi are the major Austroasiatic languages. Finally, one should mention that there was once a Kra-Dai language (a family that includes Thai and Lao) spoken in the Northeast known as Ahom. The Ahom language (having been supplanted by the Indic Assamese language) is considered dead, but there are ongoing revival efforts in the Ahom community.
While Europe has one language isolate, the subcontinent has several, but they have only a few speakers spread among tribal communities across the region. The most notable is probably Burushaski, which is spoken in the mountains of northern Pakistan. There are also several languages spoken in the Andaman Islands, which are administered by India, many of which have become or are on the verge of extinction.
Despite the incredible variety of languages in the subcontinent, contact between speakers of different languages has led to certain features spreading across the region. Two features that bind many of these languages across language families include a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order (English has Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order) and, most famously, retroflex consonants (pronounced like a “t” or “d” in a stereotypical Indian English accent), which are used in languages as different as Burushaski, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Pashto, and Santali. Thus, some linguists describe the Indian subcontinent as a sprachbund (German for a “language alliance”), which is a region with common linguistic features that transcend language family.
Of course, there are exceptions. Kashmiri has a predominantly Verb-Second (V2) word order, like German. Many of the languages of the Northeast (including the Indic Assamese, the Austroasiatic Khasi, the Kra-Dai Ahom, and various Sino-Tibetan languages) lack retroflex consonants and actually form their own sprachbund within the subcontinent!
Further, most of the subcontinent’s languages have been heavily influenced by foreign languages, like Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and (of course) English. Thus, the Tamil and the Hindi-speaker refer to their lawyers as Vakils (from Arabic), and most Indians call their keys chavi, chabi, chabhi, etc. (from the Portuguese chave). Meanwhile, many (especially the educated) will liberally sprinkle English in colloquial speech. A charitable person may say this is a natural result of the influence of English as an imperial language and a language of education. An uncharitable person will say it's because many on the subcontinent (my family included) do not study their own language intensively and substitute English words when they don't know the word in their native language, and this is due to the perception of English as a language of economic opportunity. Regardless, do not be surprised if you encounter this “code-switching” in phrases like rombo thanks (“Many thanks” in colloquial Tamil) or mujhe call karo (“Call me” in colloquial Hindi-Urdu).
// Note: It is important to point out that historically, Indian languages have themselves significantly influenced the vocabularies of English via the Silk Roads. Many terms for plant-based products in English come from Indian languages, often via Persian, Arabic, and Romance intermediaries: aubergine, ginger, indigo, mango, orange, pepper, sugar, etc.
In English (particularly British English), there are a lot of terms we use on a regular basis with roots in Indian languages. Some words were imported directly from Indian languages (some of which were, in turn, borrowed from Persian and Arabic). In contrast, others are native but came into English via Persian, Arabic, and even Japanese. Some examples include avatar, calico, cashmere, catamaran, cot, cushy, guru, karma, khaki, pajama, pundit, shampoo, shawl, thug, yoga, and Zen, among others. These examples are a testament to Greater India’s significant cultural impact worldwide over the ages. //
As with the rest of the world, there are fears across the subcontinent that this incredible diversity is being steadily erased. As mentioned above, many in India resist the influence of Hindi. In Pakistan, the same fears occur with the dominance of Urdu. Throughout the subcontinent, the specter of English looms large. Civil wars have been fought and genocides perpetrated over language policy in Bangladesh (when it was East Pakistan) and Sri Lanka. South Indians decried the “imposition” of Hindi as the sole official language in the 1960s, leading to the retention of English as an official language.
However, the major languages, which have at least ten million speakers and are official in a state or province, are unlikely to disappear. It is the many tribal, unrecognized languages like Burushaski, the Andamanese languages, Toda, and hundreds of others that are at great risk. Unfortunately, there are not many solutions. How do you convince parents to teach their children their mother tongue when languages like English and Hindi-Urdu will improve their child’s chance of having a better livelihood? The easiest solution would be to make learning these languages mandatory for native speakers, but that would generate (and has historically generated) significant resentment. After all, why should my children have to learn their mother tongue, English, and Hindi when Hindi-speaking children only have to learn their mother tongue and English.
I believe the best solution would be for everybody to learn their mother tongue, English (which is the de facto link language of the subcontinent), and a language from a different language family. This would preserve endangered languages and encourage every group to learn about each other's cultures, reducing divisions. In an ideal world in which politicians do not opportunistically use linguistic identity to divide voters and get elected, this would have been implemented across the region. For the loss of language is a loss of a culture, and the loss of a culture is a loss of the very soul of humanity.