Michael Hutt, Professor of Hindi at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) delivered a lecture on how learning languages was one way of showing the other person that one respected his/her culture. In this Global Education Summit at Presidency University last  year, the question of the ideal education  for a world as complex as ours, came up repeatedly. Various scholars spoke on the need for learning languages as a move towards bringing greater global cohesion and mutual understanding...

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Michael Hutt
Michael Hutt, Hindi and Nepali professor from SOAS gave an interesting and detailed talk on how languages could be used for building better understanding in the world. He said at the very outset that he would start with one of the questions that SOAS had framed as it stepped into its Centenary year. The question was, „Should we all speak the same language?‟ Hutt‟s answer was a resounding „no‟.
It would be a good idea to begin a summary of Hutt‟s talk by mentioning the autobiographical details he mentioned at the very end of his talk. Hutt told the audience that in 1977, he had had boarded an Air India flight from London to New Delhi, with the intention that he would build his skills in Hindi, of which he had the most basic knowledge. He had wanted to know how Hindi speakers thought about the world in their language. He further added that that action set a course to his life, and he finally became professor of Hindi and Nepali at SOAS, getting both his undergraduate and doctoral degree from this institution. Hutt probably wished to imply that a love of a particular language, by extension the culture of which it was a part, helped him to forge a sustained career for himself.
Hutt quoted facts and figures and used slides to strengthen and back his arguments. He informed the audience that the total number of languages in the world numbered 7105, but many were endangered and many were dying at an accelerated speed. Of this Europe spoke only 4% of the world‟s languages, the Asia Pacific region spoke 50%, and Africa, 30%.
He mentioned a B.B.C. program, aired a couple of years back and entitled „The Death of Language‟, in which many of these concerns over dead and dying languages were voiced. This program had posited that by the next few decades a third of the world‟s languages would be lost. Hutt informed us that the most widely spoken languages were Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and English. He admitted that the British were the most monolingual of peoples, and they probably lived with some kind of assurance that sooner or later everybody would end up speaking their language. Hutt humorously added that one of the worst shocks that one could give a diehard British mono-linguist was to say that everyone in the world now had to learn Chinese, because it was the widest spoken language. It was true he added, that many non-Chinese were now learning Chinese because of a growing global ascendancy of Chinese.
Hutt mentioned that although languages were dying the world was still a complex place linguistically. A country like Papua New Guinea for instance, had great linguistic complexity based on its numerous indigenous languages and the language of the colonizers. India too was intricate in linguistic terms. A country like the U.K. was linguistically complex today because of immigration. Baroness Amos had also mentioned that indigenous languages like Bengali and Gujarati were taught within the United Kingdom school system if there was a student constituency in that particular school district area.
Professor Hutt admitted that market forces did determine which languages stayed and which went. They certainly demanded the rise of particular languages, for instance, English. Globalization demands fast and efficient communication, and if learning a language means that the benefits of globalization may be obtained, then for many people the indigenous
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language may be given up. In other cases, as in the case of both Hindi and Bengali in the Northern and Eastern parts of India, the state or the nation has a great deal to do with the promotion of the language by declaring a certain language the national language or the state language. In a multilingual country such official policy does guarantee the rise of particular languages. The ascendancy of Swahili in East Africa was also for the same reason.
Hutt is emphatic on the point that the way to build greater global understanding, spread cultural awareness and move people away from narrow particularism, is through the avenue of language. Learning the other‟s language is one way of showing respect and in effect, saying ,„I want to know where you come from‟.
For a majority of the world‟s peoples and even theoreticians and linguists, there is no need to be overly concerned about the death of certain languages. In their opinion all languages are basically the same. Language is instinct and all people have an instinct for grammar and organization of experience through language. As Noam Chomsky had once famously said, to a Martian scientist, all earthlings would seem to speak different dialects of one major language.
However Guy Deutscher in through the Language Looking Glass, posits that although certain fundamental aspects of language, certain aspects of grammar, are innate human tendencies, other aspects of language, would come under „culture‟. According to Deutscher, all that is not „instinct‟ is culture. Instinct leads to concepts and culture to „label‟s. Yet culture seems to be making inroads into nature all the time.
Deutscher posits in this book that when you lose a language you lose an entire culture and Hutt echoes Deutscher. Michael Hutt also mentions John Locke‟s Essay on Human Understanding (1619). Locke had posited that all languages organize reality differently and thus each language is unique in this respect. Hutt also quotes Jakobson as having said that languages differ on what they must say, not on what they may say. People always find names for things they must speak about.
A very interesting part of Hutt‟s lecture was his exploration of the synonymous but phonetically different terms for tea—„cha‟ or „tha‟. He said that this example would definitely resonate well in Kolkata. He said that if one were to lay down a rule that only one form of the two widely used forms, was to prevail, histories of culture, trade and colonial encounters, would be lost.
Hutt elaborated his points by saying that tea gardens spread from Assam through Vietnam to China. The chinese started drinking tea from 2700 B.C.E. the practive then spread to Japan in 800 C.E. and then to Europe 900 years later.
He said that „cha‟ has Semitic roots and „Tha‟, Chinese. Depending on various patterns of trade and commerce and colonization different countries adopted different names for tea depending on their point of entry into these intersecting circuits. East Africa which had trading relationships with India uses „cha‟, whereas South Africa uses „tea‟, which derived from „tha‟ is used in Europe and the U.S.A. While all of Europe uses „tea‟ or a variant of
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„tha‟, Portugal uses „cha‟. The Dutch introduced who were the major traders in the Malay Archipelago area, introduced „tea‟ or „tha‟ to Java, Indonesia and Malaya. The trajectories of words are thus laid with reams and reams of cultural history, mutation and transformation.
Manabi, a student of second year Physics Honours humorously said during the time of question answers, that in Bengal „cha‟ and „tha‟ were both used because Bengalis were very used to saying that they wanted both „cha‟ and „ta‟ when they were asking for tea in a casual manner. Michael Hutt had replied, that he had chosen the reference to tea because he knew that it would resonate particularly well in Bengal.
Michael Hutt posited that in a country like Zaire or India, knowing and using more than one language would never present a surprise for anyone. He quoted the example of the number of languages spoken by a Tibetan child in Nepal. The child would speak Tibetan with his parents, Mewati with shop keepers, Nepali with friends, watch Hindi films over the week end and learn English in school.
Hutt asked, wouldn‟t a very precious part of the world‟s literatures be lost if there were no more translations? If one stopped learning languages then translations of literature would stop.
He mentions the case of a 1936 Nepali poet named Laxmi Prasad Dev Kota , who wrote Muna Madan, a moralizing fable in a sing song metre, different from the existing aristocratic traditions of Nepali literature, more derived from folk literature. Hutt said there had been couple of translations of the poem into English, including his own. He quoted four lines from the poem where the poet is asking whether it isn‟t better to eat plain lentils with a clean and happy heart than to have bags of gold obtained through foul means? Hutt reads out the two or three translations that have been made of these lines including his own. He concludes that they sound best when read in Nepali. The point that Hutt seems to be making is that a great deal of the phonetic richness and specificity and particularity of those lines would be lost if the language was lost.
Michael Hutt had mentioned at the very outset that SOAS had embarked on a project of documenting endangered languages, entitled Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP). This was done on the basis of a grant of $20 million provided by Arcadia in 2001. Till date the Project had funded the documentation of 350 endangered languages. The ELAR or Endangered Language Archive contains digital documentation of 400 languages, and has been created on the basis of 900 hours of videography and 800 hours of audio recording. To the criticism by the public at large that this project is „unsustainable global babble‟, Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the ELDP replies, that husband and wife don‟t often speak the „same language‟. Also most civil wars in world history have been fought between people who spoke the same language.
He mentioned that a contemporary African writer had criticized the practice of certain African writers of using African words in their novels. He called it „politicized provincialism‟. Professor Hutt‟s reference brings to mind the case with Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong O, who in his famous essay, „Decolonizing the Mind‟ (1986) had posited that one
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form of resistance to imperializing or colonizing cultures, was to fight them on the front of language. Hence while writing the novel in English he would use words from Gikuyu, his native language. His position had been radically different from that of Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer in the 60‟s and 70‟s of the preceding century who had declared in a 1962 talk, „I have been given this language and I intend to use it‟. Achebe was referring to the use of English in his novels. This talk was later published as an essay entitled “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964).
Regarding language competence in English presumably, Professor Hutt mentioned that an uneducated person would have a vocabulary range of 3000-5000 words, a university student would recognize 40,000 words, a university professor would have a range of 50000 to 70000 words and the O.E.D. contains 300, 000 words. He could not thus emphasize enough the importance of languages and knowledge of words. He felt that learning other languages and concurrently other cultures, revitalised the mind.
Once again Michael Hutt reiterated that language was the key to building greater global understanding among peoples. This was Baroness Amos‟s position too. Prabal Dasgupta also emphasized the need to respect languages of tribal and marginalized groups.
To a question from a student as to whether learning Latin and Greek terminology in Science demanded language competence, he replied that regarding terminology such competence was not that important or significant.
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