In reductive and prosaic terms, ‘a living language is one that is used and spoken by people of a given society or culture’. Given this, is Kashmiri a ‘living language’? This question may sound preposterous to many. A ‘common sense’ reaction to this would be, ‘but of course’. But probe deeper or scratch the surface, a different (and unsalutary) picture emerges: our mother tongue Kashmiri is a dying language. How? First, in vernacular terms, the Kashmiri we speak is far from haute Kashmiri. There is a correlation between thought (thinking) and language. If this is a tight correlation, this then means that we Kashmiris may have lost the mental paradigm of high thinking- a corollary of which is simple living. But this may not be too alarming given that there is a disconnect between haute culture- of which language is an indelible component of – and the vernacular idiom across the world.

Of greater concern and worry is that our Gen Next (Millennials of Kashmir) hardly speak Kashmiri. In the main they speak an approximation of Urdu sprinkled with English words and so on. Can this Kashmiri ‘pidgin’ this be named? I don’t know. It is difficult to coin a neologism for this. But this is beside the point. The alarmingly gradual and inexorable drift into losing our language has deep implications and consequences captured best by the phrase,’ lose your language, lose your culture’. The question that arises here is: Is culture important? Yes. It is. Why? Even though there is no such thing as an entirely original and authentic culture, but it(culture) is the anchor that gives people a meaningful framework to........

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