Languages In the World (12 page)

In the pages to come, many topics will recur, but one in particular stands out: the relationship between language and religion. We saw it already in the obstacle religion created in Sir William Jones's quest to learn Sanskrit. We will further see it woven through Chapter 5, which discusses the development and importance of writing systems, as well as Chapter 8, which discusses colonialism. Sacred languages tend to carry a lot of cultural importance, and any efforts to alter them and/or teach them to nonbelievers are going to be met with strong resistance.

The effects of their sacred nature can also be long lasting. Latin has not been spoken for several thousand years, but it is still considered a prestigious language, worth being taught in high schools and colleges in many places. In part, its prestige derives from the cultural and political importance of the Roman Empire. Another part of its prestige comes from its long place in the Christian Church and its status of the language of the Bible in Western Europe. In the fourth century CE, Eusebius Hieronymus, known today as St. Jerome, translated a number of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts to create a
versio vulgata
, or Latin Vulgate Bible. This version became the official one used by the Church, as was Latin the official language of all Christians until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Even into the eighteenth century, Latin had currency as a language of administration, for instance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in scientific discourse. All learned men at the time were expected to read and write Latin.

Such is the continuing place of Sanskrit in India today. In the August 10, 2014 edition of
The Hindu
, an English-language newspaper in India, appears the article “Where are the Sanskrit speakers?” (Sreevatsan 2014). In it, Professor Ganesh Devy of the People's Linguistic Survey of India acknowledges that no one speaks Sanskrit today, with Hindu priests using it only during ceremonies. Nevertheless, because of the continuing high prestige of this language, 14,000 people in this country of over one
billion claimed it as their mother tongue in the 2011 census. (Census 2011 language figures have not yet been released.) Devy calls Sanskrit a language with influence but no presence, placing it nowhere and everywhere. He says that Sanskrit is an idea with a strong hold on the Indian imagination. People like to think that somewhere in India, it is still spoken.

In October 2014, the Central Board of Secondary Education instituted a Sanskrit Week for schools, where students engage in activities such as learning and singing a Sanskrit hymn and practicing Vedic Mathematics, which dates back thousands of years when Sanskrit was the main language used by scholars. Like learning Latin as the basis for knowing Spanish, French, and Italian, the argument for Sanskrit Week is based on the idea that knowing something about Sanskrit helps understanding of Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi. However, like everything concerning language in a multilingual state, speakers of languages with no historical relationship to Sanskrit are not necessarily in favor of celebrating this language. In the state of Tamil Nadu, for instance, where Tamil, a Dravidian language, is spoken, certain inhabitants called for a Classical Language Week, where each state could focus on its own linguistic heritage. The point is that the inauguration of a Sanskrit Week is now infused with political overtones and effects. The language–religion–politics intersection is yet another one we will see often enough in the following chapters.

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