If, as is commonly supposed, Sanskrit is the mother of a multitude of Indian languages (first the prakrits whence emerged modern Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali) who—or what—then was the father? In her recent book Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia, renowned linguist Peggy Mohan offers a narrative in which India’s languages, at least the Indo-European ones, have two parents, not just one. Insofar as these can be gendered, Sanskrit is more father than mother.
Mohan suggests a model in which languages, especially in South Asia, is not a phenomenon arising out of linear evolution but a result of the social phenomenon of migration. New languages, at least some of them, are born when men migrate to new places, marry local women, producing not just hybrid children but also hybrid languages. These languages have structures—Mohan calls them ‘grammar”, “bones”, “substratum” and “operating system”—that come from the languages of their mothers, and vocabulary—the “flesh”—that comes from the languages of their fathers. Mohan’s position is that most arguments claiming Sanskrit as the origin of these languages are flawed in that they focus on etymologies. To truly understand a language, one must look at its grammar.
Sanskrit is rich in verbs while modern Indian languages reveal patterns content with fewer verbs and nouns that carry the weight of meaning.
Mohan’s very complex theory spans languages not just in South Asia but also Africa, New Guinea and Australia. One focus is the grammatical structure of ergativity, in which the subjects with transitive verbs acquire an extra post-position. English does not have ergativity. So “I walk” and “I drank water” have the same subject. But in Hindi, it works differently for the second example. The subject in that sentence translates to “I-by water drank.” Crucially, according to Mohan, Sanskrit does not have ergativity and it is not visible in the Rigveda, the earliest Veda. Something like this is unlikely to have arisen on its own. The language or languages of the Indus Valley Civilization, that spoken in pre-Vedan Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, often referred to as Language X, are on the other hand very likely to have ergativity.
A second feature of this pre-Sanskritic linguistic universe is the persistence of a feature Mohan calls “love for nouns”. Sanskrit is rich in verbs while modern Indian languages reveal patterns content with fewer verbs and nouns that carry the weight of meaning. For instance, “I love” and “I remember” are examples of different actions calling for different verbs. However, in Hindi, these sentences translate to the same actions signified by different nouns instead. “I love” is “I-by love do” and “I remember” is “I-by memory do.”
Mohan’s method is that of approaching “a probabilistic image” or “backward projection”. Early Northwest South Asia, as discerned from this image, seems to have been a place where the early northwest had languages with ergativity. The coming of the Aryans (around 2000 BCE) brought in newer words such as honorifics. The eastern (Magadhan) regions seem to have been a similar site: the earliest languages here were Munda. The coming of the Austro-Asiatic men about 4000 to 2000 BCE brought new words: the Munda was the substratum and the Southeast Asian languages were the vocabulary layer. Similarly, the Dravidian languages of the southern region of India, according to Mohan, are a hybrid between the languages of the men who migrated to the region from Indus Valley Civilization and the early languages spoken by the tribals in the region. Finally, Nepali comes from the older Newari, a Tibeto-Burmese language spoken in the region spoken since prehistoric times, as the substratum and the languages of the migrant Khasa men who came to the Kathmandu Valley about 500 years ago. Mohan uses the Tiramisu bear as an example to illustrate her point:
A Tiramisu bear is the offspring of a male grizzly bear who has migrated north in a time of climate change and a female polar bear who, in other times, would not have been on land but on the sea perched on an ice floe. As polar males cannot migrate south – they can only walk on snow and ice – and female bears do not migrate at all, grizzly males and polar females are the only way to produce a Tiramisu bear.
Everywhere she looks in South Asia, she sees Tiramisu bears of modern Indian languages.
Mohan provides another way of thinking about how new languages come into being.
How Mohan’s model will be received will unfold over time. But it is very likely that it will have an influence over what she says are patriarchal ways of looking at language:
To dismiss their entire maternal history and focus only on the men’s languages that gave the hybrids some vocabulary and numeral classifiers in an encounter thousands of years is the sort of patriarchal thinking that linguistics should have got over long ago.
A second theory or discipline wide impact of the book is its framing of language evolution in the context of India. Mohan provides another way of thinking about how new languages come into being. A previous model most people understand is that of pidgin-creole model: one in which different groups come together and new settings, such as the plantations in the colonies, give rise to new hybrids. These start out as pidgins and then become creoles. However, India did not experience massive displacement or uprooting that would have caused modern Indian languages to arise between 10th and 12th centuries. Mohan’s view is that what India witnessed was a much slower, and much less violent process, a condition that has never really made the linguists working on the subject think about sociohistorical phenomena:
On the slave plantations there would, however, have been a sense of never going back, and a need to come to terms with the new language environment. In South Asia there was probably less pressure, as the local people who found themselves occupied by powerful settlers had not actually left home. So the mixed languages would have emerged more slowly, with the old languages surviving much longer. This is something we still see happening in the tribal Munda lands in eastern India, words from Indo-Aryan dialects trickling in, giving the tribal languages a familiar feel to some of us who know those local dialects. But in the end, there would have been enough environmental change for ‘Tiramisu bears’ to start appearing, languages where almost all the vocabulary came from the prakrits, whale much of the ‘operating system’, or grammar, was preserved from the old local languages.
The book is not really intended for someone who is not very familiar with the history of South Asia and the history of the languages of the region but it does offer insight about how one must think about languages and the way they are shaped by social history.