By Zahid Mushtaq

You don’t need to walk through a university gate or open a dusty grammar book to see where language really lives. It’s there in the chatter of school kids switching between Kashmiri and Hindi mid-sentence, in the Urdu phrases tucked between English status updates, in the auntie at the market giving directions with a mix of all three. In Kashmir, like in much of the world, language doesn’t stay still. It flows, adapts, and reinvents itself, often faster than we can measure.

And yet, each time a young person hesitates in their mother tongue, someone sounds the alarm. “We’re losing our culture,” they say. “They don’t speak like we did.” But language doesn’t disappear just because it sounds different. It changes because people change. Cultures do too.

Take any young student in Srinagar. She might write her college essays in English, crack jokes with classmates in Urdu, and talk to her grandmother in Kashmiri. This isn’t a crisis. It’s fluency in a modern, layered identity. It shows adaptability, not loss.

But there’s a deep nostalgia that clings to ideas of linguistic purity, as if only an untouched version of a language is real, and everything else is a fall from grace. It’s a comforting story, especially for those who no longer need to hustle for a job or impress a visa officer. But for most Kashmiris, especially the young, switching tongues is not about fashion. It’s strategy.

When a mother encourages her........

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