Agenda
Item 32: Multilingualism -
Statement
by Dr. A.V.S. Ramesh Chandra, First Secretary on December 21, 2001
____________________________________________________________________________________
Mr. President,
It is sad, but fitting, that we take up this agenda item on
‘Multilingualism' on a day when we have learnt of the death of President
Leopold Senghor of Senegal, because no one understood better than he did what
true multilingualism meant, and the need to cultivate a knowledge of languages
to bridge the apparent gaps between cultures and civilisations. He thought that
African and Asian languages that were now so different, that seemed to be the
voice of completely separate cultures, had similarities that revealed an
ancient, common root. Believing, on
the basis of his own scholarship, that there were linkages between the Dravidian
languages of India and languages spoken in West Africa, President Senghor set up
a Chair of Dravidian Studies in the University of Dakar, to explore, celebrate
and develop these links between Africa and India, and between our culture and
languages. We pay tribute to his vision.
Mr. President,
Multilingualism is a mixed blessing; it is a Babel that divides, it is
only very rarely a pentecostal gift of tongues.
Of course, being monolingual promotes insularity rather than unity;
several countries, not just two, are divided by a common language.
It is important, therefore, to know both the power and the limits of
language; in our region, a country created on the basis of religion broke up on
the basis of language; elsewhere, nations that share a language have been torn
apart by religion. The United
Nations certainly needs to seriously discuss the challenges of multilingualism.
It is a challenge with which we grow up in India.
Every Indian learns his mother tongue, and all Indians learn Hindi, which
is our official language. Very
large numbers of Indians live outside the Indian States where their mother
tongues are spoken, and learn the language of their adopted state.
All Indian languages are complex, almost none share a script, which means
that all Indians, by the time they are in middle school, have learnt two, quite
often three, languages with scripts as different as Russian and French,
sometimes as different as Spanish and Arabic, all of them with a rich and
ancient literary heritage. And, simultaneously, they are taught English, so, by the time
they leave school, most Indians speak two, sometimes three, Indian languages,
and English. To be Indian,
therefore, is to be multilingual.
We understand the virtues and the uses of multilingualism, but we also
know that it can be used to sidestep a dialogue, rather than to invite it.
During our colonial interregnum, when Indian maharajahs were forced to
accept a British Resident at their durbars, one of them, knowing that most
Englishmen in India were monoglots, and, of any foreign language, were likely to
have the most distaste for French, decreed that French would be the language of
his court. For many years, through
this ingenious embrace of multilingualism, he made sure that he did not have to
exchange a word with successive British Residents.
That clever maharajah has been born again in many avatars at the UN.
His voice is heard whenever delegates, fortunate enough to have one of
the official languages as their mother tongue, insist that they would stop
negotiating if they were forced to speak in a foreign language.
They forget that most delegates have no choice; an Indian, for instance,
a Japanese, a Nigerian or a Brazilian never gets to speak in their mother
tongues at the UN. At a recent
meeting, when interpretation stopped, the South African chairman’s proposal to
continue in English provoked outrage from others who accused him of partiality,
arguing that they would be put to a disadvantage if they could not speak in
their mother tongues. I agree with
you, sighed the Chair, and started to speak in Zulu; multilingual protests
quickly faded then into tongue-tied embarrassment.
At the UN now, as in that distant Indian court, language is politics.
Human beings speak languages, not states, but it is the interplay of state
politics that has determined which would be the official languages of the UN.
Hindi, for instance, is spoken by over a billion people in India, and it
is understood or spoken by millions more in the rest of South Asia, and in the
Indian diaspora. More people speak
Hindi than speak French, for example, or Russian or Arabic, but Hindi is not an
official language of the United Nations. Questions
are asked about this in the Indian Parliament, and though we explain that each
additional official language raises the cost of conference services
exponentially, we are not sure this entirely satisfies our parliamentarians,
because they see the choice of the six official languages as arbitrary at best,
giving those a status denied to others which have as good a claim or better to
be considered world languages.
We
know the UN cannot have a vast number of official languages, but what the UN
should not do is to confuse multilingualism with the promotion only of the six
languages it has dubbed official. These
six languages are privileged over hundreds of others; however, class
distinctions have crept in among them, one has become more equal than others,
and the others resent this. To put
this in terms of feudal experience, the barons are up in arms against the king,
but for the plebeians, this is not their fight, it promotes no interest of
theirs.
We
thank France for trying to accommodate all shades of concern.
However, even as amended, the draft before us proposes changes in
administrative policy that cannot and should not be smuggled in through a
resolution on multilingualism. These
are issues that should be considered in the Fifth Committee, in the light, not
just of present practice, but even more, of the principles of the Charter. If
implemented, the proposal made in this draft would place an enormous extra
burden on those who do not have an official language as their mother tongue.
It would ignore the fact that an Indian staff member, for instance, was
already at least trilingual, but would expect him or her to have learnt a second
foreign language, in addition to English. When
not one Indian language is an official language, we would consider this, not the
promotion of multilingualism, but of prejudice.
Nationals
of the major contributors dominate the Secretariat because most of the posts are
allocated on the basis of contributions. The
two working languages of the Secretariat are European languages.
Four out of the six official languages are also European languages.
It is not surprising, therefore, that most developing countries feel that
the Secretariat, either consciously or simply because of the way it is composed
and functions, promotes a Western agenda. Multilingualism
has not made it multicultural or given it a truly international personality;
what the Secretariat promotes as universal norms are usually the latest Western
fads. Very rarely does the
Secretariat betray a consciousness that it is supposed to be an institution that
gathers together all cultures, different traditions of thought, a variety of
points of view. Anything that makes
it even more difficult for the Secretariat to recruit from developing countries,
or to promote their nationals within the system, will strengthen the bias that
already exists.
In
India we cherish multilingualism, simply because we cannot get by without it.
We welcome any initiative to promote true multilingualism, but we deeply
regret that the draft resolution before us strays into areas of administrative
policy that would warp, even more, the structure of the Secretariat, promote
linguistic chauvinism, and create problems for our nationals.