LL-L "Language revival" 2008.02.21 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 21 February 2008 - Volume 02
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language revival

Dear Lowlanders,

Once in a while the subject of language revival comes up in our discussions,
typically mentioning the cases of Hebrew and Cornish.

For your information, there is at least one other cases, namely that of
Jhiri Village in Rajgarh District, Madya Pradesh, Central India.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMWostFwwJc&feature=related
(Bear with the initial commercials.)

http://newswhichmatter.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

Internet promotion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbAyDqEksfs

Apparently, some council or other decided that Sanskrit be the public or
official local language. Villagers were opposed at first, but three years
later almost everyone converses in Sanskrit. Children use Sanskrit in school
and now use it with each other outside school, and adults have joined in.

An Indo-Aryan and thus Indo-European language, Sanskrit is the medium of
Hinduism and of Mahayana Buddhism. (Theravada Buddism uses Pali instead, a
descendant of Sanskrit.) Sanskrit is supposed to be extinct as a spoken
language, but it is still used as a spoken as well as written lingua franca
in Sanskrit colleges and such. It's status is thus similar to that of Latin
in the Roman Catholic world and the West in general. It is one of the
official languages of India and is considered the ancestor of Modern
Indo-Aryan languages (Hindustani, Nepali, Panjabi, Gujarati, Marathi,
Bengali, Assamese, Sinhalese, etc.). For most Hinduists, Sanskrit is a
sacred language. Some Indian movies and TV plays (such as those based on the
ancient epic महाभारत *Mahābhārata*) use spoken Sanskrit, and this helps even
illiterate members of the public in India and Nepal to acquire certain
levels of listening comprehension.

I assume that most people of Jhiri village are speakers of Hindi. For them
it is obviously not all that difficult to switch to Sanskrit. However, it
seems difficult enough to me, since Hindi has undergone numerous
phonological shifts and contractions as well as morphosyntactic
simplifications, and it has acquired numerous Persian and English words and
expressions. In my estimation, the switch is similar to that from Italian
and other Modern Romance languages to Latin, for example.

What is remarkable in the case of Jhiri is the speed with which Sanskrit
established itself. I don't know how much coercion was involved, but what it
does seem to show is that a combination of high prestige and intensive
promotion and education go a long way in efforts of this sort.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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