Disclaimer: I totally am not a linguist and don't really know anything about diglossia (or the Tamil language) on a scholarly level. I'm just venting a little here.
Diglossia is defined as "a situation where a given language community uses two languages or dialects," "the use of two varieties of a language by members of a society for distinct functions or by distinct groups or classes of people," and "the existence of two official languages in a society." And it's one of the characteristics of Tamil, my mother tongue (a phrase I believe only South Asian people seem to use...). What diglossia does to my world is mess it up. While Indian Americans whose mother tongue is Hindi can [with some effort] understand Hindi song lyrics, and Hindi poetry, can read a Hindi newspaper or watch a Hindi newscast and understand what he or she is reading or hearing, I can't do the same with Tamil.
Of course, I'm simplifying this a little: you'd have to be pretty proficient at Hindi to really understand a newscast or newspaper or poetry in the language, and I can definitely pick up words here and there in Tamil film songs if I try hard enough. But really: because I've never studied Tamil, only learned it through speaking to my family, I'm largely unaware of the true forms of most of the words I speak in this language. For example: if I were to say "it's raining" in Tamil, I would say "mazhai peyyarthu." But if I were to write it (or if the same phrase were to appear in a song, say), it would actually be "mazhai peygirathu." [And don't even get me started on transliterating Tamil; something as lovely as "moonlight caught in a bowl" looks a little ridiculous when you have to spell it out as "vennillaa velicham kinnaththil vizhinthu"] In short, the spoken form of my native language is kind of like AIM talk: abbreviations and shortenings galore. This would all be fine and dandy, if only I had been aware of this some time before I was around twenty years old. But I wasn't. So I went through a fair chunk of my life bemoaning the fact that I just didn't get Tamil. I could understand Hindi film song lyrics, for crying out loud, but lyrics in my own language, the first one I ever spoke, went over my head. What's wrong with that picture, right?
Thankfully, finding out about diglossia served to relieve me of my slight inferiority complex/identity crisis. It also, though, makes me feel a little cheated. Wouldn't life be so much easier if I were a native Hindi speaker and didn't have to work so darn hard to decipher my own language? I feel a bit like I'm being cheated of some sort of linguistic birthright. I mean, Tamil has a proud literary tradition: It not only predates Sanskrit, but has outlived it as a spoken language. But I find myself on the outside of much of its beauty, simply because I never formally learned it. I was hoping to learn Tamil in earnest (from my grandmother, a retired schoolteacher; she taught music in school, but she definitely knows Tamil well enough to teach it) during my time here, but I kind of lost interest somehow or other. Maybe I should do what I can in my last seven days. When all you're doing is reading novels and playing on your iPod Touch and bumming around, I'm sure you could squeeze lots of learning into the time that would have been whiled away otherwise.
To that end, I'm going to go chill with my grandma now.
Hi Angel, Tamil survives and thrives mainly because of this diglossic nature. A Hindi speaker cannot talk about his language 1000 years back. Similarly an English speaker will not understand most of the words of the English that was in existence 1000 years back. But more than 2000 years old Tamil works are still being taught to children in schools in Tamil nadu and elsewhere. And we all understand it (for example Thirukkural). So literature is protected from getting polluted by the change in the common people's tongue. And a language's greatness is measured by the amount and quality of literature in it.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea about all that! Thanks for the info, Shaan.
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