Neither Tamil nor Hindi is keeping pace with the future, says leading linguist Peggy Mohan

In this interview, Peggy Mohan talks about how intermarriage, power shifts, and urban life influenced language change.

Four years ago, with the lucidly written Wanderers, Kings, Merchants, Peggy Mohan traced the history of India through the languages its people speak. In her new book, Father Tongue, Motherland, the linguist goes further, exploring how languages in South Asia emerged through the mixing of old local grammars and the vocabularies of new arrivals. Drawing on the creole model of language evolution, she shows how these interactions shaped the region’s modern tongues. Mohan grew up in Trinidad in a multilingual household—her father was of Indian origin, her mother Canadian—and heard English, Bhojpuri, and Creole spoken around her. She holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Michigan and has taught at Harvard and Ashoka University. In this interview, Mohan talks about how intermarriage, power shifts, and urban life influenced language change, why Tamil and Hindi may not be keeping up with the future, and her long-held wish to reconstruct a Harappan song.

Peggy Mohan.

How does the Creole model of language mixture apply to the emergence of new languages in South Asia?

Creole isn’t just about slavery in the Caribbean. It’s a way of seeing how languages mix in a two-stranded way. Just like we have mothers and fathers, languages hybridise when migrants meet locals, often through real, physical intermarriage and mingling. The people who intrude into these situations are almost always men. They arrive, and then they need wives or they will go extinct. Whether in West Africa, or in the Vedic period in the Indus Valley, or later in the Deccan, they behave like explorers. They marry local women, and a first generation is born that knows two languages. But the real hybridisation comes later — when people not connected to the original migrants start changing their lives, moving into cities, joining plantations. That’s when these men and women together create families, and language changes with them.

You can see it historically in the Deccan too. Men came from the north, married local women and later, more and more locals saw the world had changed permanently. The language of power was new. But they didn’t adopt it fully — instead, they grafted it onto their earlier language. That’s how you get Dakkhini: Urdu words on top of a Telugu operating system. And just like that, you can trace Vedic Sanskrit words coming into Prakrit, and then the modern languages, layered over something older — something that had to be from the Indus Valley Civilization. Eventually, when the local languages absorbed enough Prakrit words, the Prakrits disappeared. The Indus Valley languages disappeared. And you were left with something entirely new.

Peggy Mohan's book Father Tongue, Motherland.

What role did the early Muslim sultanates play in the development of modern Indian languages?

The Muslim sultanates happened into India at a time when a rather unwieldy, crumbling Prakrit-based era was coming to a close, but without any momentum to give it its final push and knock it down. So it was continuing, and you had the elites all over India speaking in Prakrit, and the poor people completely out of it. If you think of it, that’s what we have now. You and I are speaking English, and poor people are really curious: what are they talking about? And how can we participate in this discourse? The final push to knock down the Prakrits came when the sultanates came in. They didn’t physically create the new languages. They took over and then they started inviting people who spoke the new languages — Bengali, Marathi, varieties of it — into the royal courts. They gave patronage to these languages.

Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin recently accused Hindi of swallowing several languages, from Maithili to Mundari. Did Tamil, too, supplant several languages?

In fact, it did. You cannot go to any tribe in the south of India and find a language that is not Dravidian. Absorption by Dravidian languages is complete. Not Tamil, specifically. All the tribal languages of the south are now Dravidian. Tamil is one of India’s most varied languages – one cannot talk of it as a single variety. It is not easy to see in the case of Tamil, because a single name is used to refer to all the varieties. Whereas Hindi, being a 12th century language, came up at the same time as Braj, Avadhi and Marwari, among others. All of these were on par with Hindi, so it’s easier to talk about how Hindi has eclipsed them. Forty years ago, I was saying exactly the same thing Stalin is today. I’m a Bhojpuri speaker, and my own language has been swallowed. I used to feel bad about a language dying until eventually I saw that there’s an interesting triage that happens with languages. If you have too many languages, and their survival is based on poverty—and people being marginal, and not engaging with modern topics, being labourers, being forest dwellers—that’s not sustainable. Unless you agree that inequality is something desirable. What you get is smaller languages not being used in modern contexts. They tend to subside not because people are dying, but because they are actually, physically, themselves pushing their children into schools that teach languages of power.

What is your position on the New Education Policy’s three-language formula?

We are seeing a push from the Centre to promote Hindi for purposes that have nothing to do with empowering people. But I don’t think politicians have much of a role in the issue. They can speak about it, but the issue will be decided by the market and by technology. That’s where the real battle will be fought. Supporters of Hindi might well claim that it is the language of pop culture or literature, but that’s not enough. You have to engage with the future and neither Tamil nor Hindi is doing it sufficiently. To be fully alive, you need to be writing software, doing frontier research in Tamil and Hindi. I see no problem with the multiplicity of languages in India because generally if there is ever a language problem, it gets sorted out by people themselves. It’s interesting to look at the south of Maharashtra and the whole Deccan and see a twilight zone that is in many ways neither northern or southern. Language is not intellectual, it’s environmental. If you haven’t created an environment where people feel the need to learn a particular language, they won’t learn it.

The Tamil Nadu government recently announced a $1 million reward for deciphering the Indus Valley script. Even with advancements in AI, what are the chances of ever decoding it?

I just spent three days in Chennai, where people are using mathematical tools to prove that the seals represent a natural language. Personally, I don't focus on the seals at all because I have another source of data: the grammatical structures in modern North Indian languages, which clearly don't come from Sanskrit. So, where did they come from? From there, you begin to reconstruct a basic framework, though there are still many unanswered questions. One of the things I need to prove is that some of the features of these modern languages that are not in Sanskrit are old enough to have existed during the time of the Indus Valley civilization. My dream is to sit down with my students and actually reconstruct a song in Harappan. It would probably include many sounds common in Punjabi today, which, when you hear them in songs from that region, might even make you think of Malayalam.