What if I lose my language? What if I have lost my language?

I admire people, who, on the move, maintain and transfer their heritage languages to the next generations. By “maintain,” I mean the transfer of spoken language or as a boli (Mahboob, 2023).

In our family, our generation has grappled with the challenges of preserving all of our languages, and unfortunately, we have not succeeded in passing down all these languages to the next generation.

Multilingual Kashmiri ancestries

My paternal grandfather Shams-ud-Din was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, and raised in a Kashmiri-speaking family, shortly after the Great Famine of India (1876-1878) under British Crown rule and after Jang-e-Azadi (the War of Independence) (1857), also referred to as “Mutiny” from the British Raj’s and coloniser’s perspective and language.

The Great Famine of India itself, during the Crown rule, not only took the lives of millions of people but also caused mass displacements and internal migrations. This era did not only result in an astounding loss of life, but also came to have long-lasting consequences for health. Recent research shows that the British Raj era heightened the risk of diabetes in South Asians, a testament to the complex and extensive consequences of historical episodes.

Even though my initial childhood years were spent with my grandfather, I am not aware of the extent of his formal education. Vivid in my fond memories of him, however, remain his proficiency in several languages. He was well-versed in writing English, Persian and Urdu, accompanied by the eloquence of his bolis, Kashmiri and Punjabi. A brief part of his life was spent in service of the Empire’s machinery, the British Hindustani Police. Despite that, I recall the fervor in his stories about the resistance against the angrez rulers.

My paternal grandmother, Rehmat, was also a Kashmiri, however, her Kashmiriness manifested slightly differently from my grandfather’s. Her story, and subsequently my story and my linguistic skills, are also entrenched in the environmental, socio-historic events and linguistic ecology of the region. Her family, along with numerous others, were among the migrants from Kashmir to the-then unified Punjab, specifically Lahore, colloquially referred to as the province’s heart, during a famine in the seventeenth century under the Company Raj.

Among these migrant Kashmiris was Allama Iqbal, one of the foremost poets and philosophers of the region. He wrote in Urdu (also called Hindustani at that time), Persian, English, and German, while he was a lecturer of Arabic. Also fluent in Punjabi, one of the major languages of Sialkot city, where his ancestors settled, Allama Iqbal’s second and third generations (as well his predecessors) can be regarded as fully assimilated into Punjabi culture and language. It highlights a poignant contrast – the loss of one language, and the gain of another, a reminder of the pulsating progression of cultural and linguistic identities.

South Asian diglossia

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris exemplify how diglossia functioned in multilingual communities. Pakistan and other South Asian nations similarly encapsulate traits of diglossic countries. In the case of South Asia and Pakistan, the notion of one language or one ethnic group is rendered a myth, just as the assumption that one nation necessitates one language. Based on this assumption, in linguistic communities such as the Kashmiris, it remains a challenge to pinpoint a single language that represents all of them. This monoethnic perspective, however, is rooted in Eurocentric global North discourses and epistemologies which does not capture the nuanced realities of bilingual communities (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017).

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also showcase that the purposes of languages in one’s repertoire can be different, and those uses do not necessarily need to confirm imperial language categorizations. For instance, consider the Punjabi language in present-day Pakistan (and in the context of British Hindustan). Even though it is a written language as well, it has never been used as a medium of instruction or even taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Its absence in primary, secondary and higher education does not mean it is endangered in any form. Take the example of ‘Pasoori,’ a Punjabi song from Pakistan that garnered 696 million views and was the most searched song on Google in 2022. This not only showcases the song’s immense popularity but also underscores the idea that languages can thrive in various forms and modalities.

New bolis in migration

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also exemplify that language shift occurs in diasporic communities when the connection between the homeland and the migrants is weakened. Language shift means that when communities settle in new lands, new varieties will become part of the repertoire.

Fast forward to 2024, I find myself incapable of being able to speak all the bolis of my grandparents. I have lost two of my heritage bolis. Similarly, my children cannot speak all the bolis of their grandparents. Triple migrations and moving from one place to another have left us leaving one language for another; however, we still carry some of the mannerisms of our bolis in other languages – our Kashmiri-Pakistaniness manifests in English, Urdu, Swedish, and a mixture of all the above! We perform our identities through new vehicles, in new mediums, new bolis.

My autoethnographic account, my story, my loss of language is similar to some of those who are on the move and from those whose ancestors are forced to leave whether it is because of colonization, famine, family reunification, forced persecution, or fear.

My deep admiration extends to those who successfully maintain and pass on more than one heritage language in all modalities. I have strived to break free from the confines of limiting language competence within Euro-centric epistemologies and linguistic standardization ideals, recognizing their inherent written language bias (Linell, 2004) and the promotion of the notion of one language for one linguistic community. On the contrary, I argue that linguistic communities transcend beyond the geographical boundaries of nation states, provinces, regions, or clans.

Within the broad landscape of linguistic theories and epistemologies that conceptualize the multilingual competence of communities within the former British Raj, there emerges a pivotal challenge deserving attention: Euro-centric epistemologies and theorization fall short of accurately labelling and describing both individual and societal multilingualism. This challenge becomes vividly apparent in my family’s diglossia, where the interchange between two distinct linguistic varieties mirrors the diverse language practices found in both Pakistani society and its diaspora.