How to kill a language |
No year-enders this time. I have not recovered enough from what this year inflicted on me to write dispassionately about it. But as the name promises, I am writing the next worst thing: the decline and imminent fall of Urdu.
Recently, Hasan Minhaj and Kumail Nanjiani, two brown men at the top of their Hollywood game, struggled to explain a feeling to an English audience. In a viral video titled 'A Deeply Unserious India-Pakistan Summit with Kumail Nanjiani', they discussed how English lacks an equivalent to the Urdu concept of Ishq or to the specific pain of separation. As they briefly explained the idea of 'yearning', they too were yearning for a language that, for them, is already a ghost. A vibe without a vessel.
As you read this, the 18th Aalmi Urdu Conference is underway in Karachi. While the audience claps, the patient is dying in the cloud. The conference is a ventilator for a body that the digital world has already rejected.
Call this melodrama? You just spoke to your child in Urdu, so how is it dying? Look at the evidence. The murder is happening in the code.
Amazon's Kindle treats Urdu like a contagion. It claims it cannot handle the script's reflow, forcing authors to upload books as static images or PDFs. This technical barrier effectively kills the Urdu e-book market before it can be born. Try finding a native Urdu e-book on Kobo or Apple Books. You will find blank space.
Streaming giants are no better. Netflix and YouTube aggressively centre Hindi, serving Devanagari titles or Roman gibberish for Urdu content. Even when the audio is in Urdu, the platform categorises it as Hindi, subsuming it into the dataset of the majority. We are told........