Revive the vernacular languages

WITH reference to the story “Indian languages are dying” (POST, November 23-27).

Yes, Indian languages are dying. As our elders pass on, so do the languages they and their predecessors who came to South Africa spoke and passed on to us. The problem is that in my formative years, I attended Hindu Tamil Primary School where the vernacular languages were taught, including Urdu and Gujarati.

Pure languages like Tamil, Hindi and Urdu hardly appear as spoken languages, even in commercial radio and television programmes.

Lately, in certain schools, Chinese or mandarin appears in the curriculum. So why don’t languages such as Urdu, Tamil and Hindi?

I admire what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has done. To get Turks to continue speaking and communicating in Turkish, the government has translated academic books published by international non-Turkish authors and, wait for this, even the plays of William Shakespeare into Turkish.

It is easy to be multilingual without compromising the vernacular languages of our forebears which your front page rightfully laments are dying.

This calls for a revival of these languages of discourse.

I would like to see Tamil, Urdu and Hindi alongside the official languages and so, I hope that your front-page article is more than a headlined story.

Mr Editor, stay with the story and help promote the fight for the restoration of these languages.

SABER AHMED JAZBHAY

Newlands West