Editor,
The irony of the Hindi-English debate after what happened on March 20, 2023 the first day of the budget session in the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly is that if one goes just 20 kms from Shillong to Smit village which falls under Nongkrem constituency,very few will be able to speak, write or even understand English let alone Hindi. The bigger irony is that if Meghalaya has a Governor who has a good command of the English language and if he had delivered his inaugural speech in English, I bet about 50 percent of our legislators will not be able to fully grasp what he is saying since legislative jargon is hard to grasp if one doesn’t have a good command of the English language.
In terms of linguistic diversity, the Khasi and Jaintia Hills is like a mini North India in itself. All the dialects are related and interconnected but each dialect has its own nuances which make it difficult to speak or understand if one is a non-native speaker of the particular dialect. A Gujarati and a Bihari who speaks Bhojpuri will find it hard to communicate with one another even though both the languages are related and they both belong to the same group of languages. Likewise a War Khasi from Pynursla and a Pnar from Mookoiaw will find it difficult to communicate with each other even though both the dialects belong to the same group of languages. For the people of North and West India, Hindi is the link language and for the Khasi and Jaintia community, the Sohra dialect is the link language.
The point I’m trying to make is that the Khasi and Jaintia Hills is a hotspot with high linguistic diversity and the beauty of it all is that all the dialects are related and interconnected. My father’s dialect which is the Mawsynram dialect is different from my mother’s dialect which is a variation of a dialect spoken in certain parts of Khasi Hills; both dialects are also different from the Sohra dialect spoken at home.
Another point to remember is that the quality of English education in the state as a whole is not up to the mark and the majority of the inhabitants of the state are handicapped especially when it comes to written English. Before we claim the English language as our own, there needs to be a marked improvement in the quality of English education and secondly we must always keep this in mind that apart from our shared customs and traditions, our language is what defines us as a community. The Khasi and Jaintia community is fortunate in that we have a lingua franca and that all the dialects are related and interconnected. The Nagas for example are not so lucky; almost all the dialects of the different Naga tribes are totally different from one another. All they have to unite them as a community is shared history.
Yours etc.,
Gary Marbaniang,
Via email
