ARUNANDI: Lingua franca of Arunachal Pradesh, a thought

“Aunandi: Lingua franca of Arunachal-a thought” published in The Arunachal Times and “Aunandi: Lingua franca of Arunachal” published in Arunachal Front dated Friday, 26 March 2010

(Nending Ommo)

 

Viacheslav A. Chirikba in “The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund” says that lingua franca was originally referred to “Frankish language” of Italy which is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons’ mother tongues.

Arunachal Pradesh with over ten lakhs population (a disturbing figure of only 62.4 % of population being native scheduled tribes) with the least density of population in India (13 persons per sq/km) is a fascinating multicultural and multilingual people group. Lesser the population it seems, grander is the diversity. According to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Lists (Modification) Order, 1956 and as inserted by Act 69 of 1986 states, the STs in the state are “All tribes of the State including: Abor, Aka, Apatani, Dafla (now Nyishi), Galong (now Galo), Khampti, Khowa, Mishmi, Monpa, Momba, Any Naga tribes, Sherdukpen, Singpho”. The notification gives only an illustration of a few STs. In 2001 Census, total of 100 STs have been enumerated out of which on twenty-five of them have returned 5,000 and above population. According to the official website of Arunachal Pradesh, there are twenty major tribes and several other sub tribes. Each tribe has different language and socio- religious practices. Some of the closer groups share some common traits of cultural similarities and even their languages and various dialectal variations are mutually intelligible. But on the other hand, there are tribes which show sharp contrasts between different people groups: neither their cultural practices nor their languages bear a resemblance to each other.

There are twenty two official languages set out in the eighth schedule as of May 2008. According to Presidential Order, 1960, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India 27 April 1960 (retrieved 4 February 2010) the principal official language of the Republic of India is Hindi while English is the secondary official language. According to the Article 343 (1), “The Official Language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagri script”. The individual states can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. For example, the state of Tamil Nadu has Tamil as its sole official language while a multilingual state like Jammu and Kashmir has Kashmiri, Urdu and Dogri as its official languages. In North-eastern states in India, Mizoram has Mizo, Manipur has Manipuri/ meiteilon, Sikkim has Nepali as their sole official languages; Assam has Assamese and Bodo, Tripura has English, Bengali and Kokborok as their official languages and Arunachal, Meghalaya and Nagaland have English as their official languages.

While Article 343 was inserted it was envisioned that Hindi would become the exclusive working language of the central government by 1965, with state governments entrusted freedom to function in languages of their own choice. This has not, however, happened in that exclusive manner and English is also employed along with Hindi for official purposes. In this context of Hindi being adopted as the official language, there occurred widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi upon non-native speakers, in some states, especially the Anti-Hindi agitations in the state of Tamil Nadu, which ensued in the passage of the Official Languages Act (1963).

But uniquely and quite convincingly without any hue and cry we Arunachalis have embraced cultures, religions and languages which are non-native. My talk here is about language. Language is a subtle issue which is very political but my discussion here is academic and linguistic.

Some states are deadly against adopting Hindi and some even are fighting for the compulsory imposition of their language in their states. Our neighbours Assam and Manipur, even Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra of many are against Hindi. But predictably we Arunachalis have not shown any resistance. Though English is our official language, apart from paper works, we hardly speak and we always land up with Hindi. In fact, it is of much advantage to the Arunachalis to know Hindi as we can employ it anywhere in India provided Hindi is known in that area. Subconsciously though, Hindi has become lingua franca of Arunachal Pradesh. The education system has given boost to Hindi as almost in all the institutions the medium of teaching is supposed to be English but mostly classes are Hindi oriented. Today except for some places adjoining Assam, the link language between the multilingual Arunachalis is Hindi. Hindi can be heard anywhere in Arunachal and most of the people including the older folks know Hindi. Some two or three decades ago when there were no good education institutes, students use to venture out to Assam to study and the schools in Arunachal taught Assamese and even other subjects were taught in Assamese. That was a time when Assamese was widely used and was the link language. But of late Hindi has taken over.

The matter of fact is that Hindi that we Arunachalis speak is crude. There is no gender system, no honorific attributes, no proper case markings, no correct pronunciations of the phonemes of Hindi with highly nativised accent and many more worries exist. I, as a concerned citizen of Arunachal, would like everyone to adopt English as the lingua franca or the link language. At this stage this might sound absurd, nonsensical and impractical. But with political will and proper implementation of education system, we can achieve it. The reason why I advocated for English was due to the entwined web of identity crisis we North- easterners are into once we are out of our home in the ‘mainland’ India. Mongoloid racial stocks of North-east who are either studying or working out in ‘mainland’ will empathise with me to what I am asserting. As long as you speak your own native language or in English you are safe and looked upon with much enthusiasm as if you are foreigner somewhere from Southeast Asia or least some well informed people will guess that we are from North-east of India and till than you earn good standing. But the very next instance you utter a word in Hindi, your joyous honeymoon is smashed; still you are considered as foreigner but from Nepal. It is still well as long as you are considered a Nepali as they are human too like us but what they mean by Nepali is people doing menial works and lowly uneducated and uncivilised people. They will start hurling you with abusive and obnoxious praises: chinkie, bahadur, thapa, daju, kancha…. Fortunate enough, if someone asks you where you are from and you proudly proclaim “Arunachal Pradesh”, it is finished. They will have never heard of it except for few educated people. All they know is Manipur, Nagaland or Shillong.

Having said all these, I would wish that if we are going to continue with Hindi we should strive to perfect our Hindi with proper grammar and pronunciations. And if we are to continue this way with our Hindi as the lingua franca or the link language, we should create our own genre of Hindi for which I would propose the name as “ARUNANDI”, a blended word from Arunachal and Hindi. It should be highly assimilated with native traits like the Nagamese which is a pidginised Creole used in Nagaland. It is a mixed language based on Assamese. Since Nagaland is inhabited by people belonging to different Naga tribes speaking languages which are mutually unintelligible (like Arunachal), Nagamese is the link language for all. It is used in the Nagaland Legislature, as a means of explanation in Nagaland schools and in mixed households.

Nagamese is just an instance. There are many other link languages across the world which have been either artificially created (Esperanto) or naturally evolved catering to the need of societal bilingualism (Krio in Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea). If shifting to English is hypermetropiac and is not instantaneously feasible at this point of time, we can nurture our AUNANDI so that the younger generations do not fight this battle of identity crisis as we are engaged in and also that we can proudly proclaim to be the creators and owners of ARUNANDI.