Every language dies twice. First, in the classroom. Then at the dinner table. Kashmir appears to be somewhere between the two. The danger is not that the Kashmiri language will disappear tomorrow. The danger is that it will survive only as fragments: a few household expressions, a few affectionate insults, a few bakery names, a handful of nostalgic words. The day a people begin to feel embarrassed by their own language is the day they begin to forget themselves.
Khalid Quyoom
Every language dies twice. First, in the classroom, when people stop teaching it to their children. Then at the dinner table, when they stop speaking it to one another. Kashmir, unfortunately, appears to be somewhere between the two. Yet Kashmiri is far too resilient a language, and far too deeply embedded in our culture, to disappear quietly. Even those who abandon it rarely escape it. It returns disguised in their Urdu, sneaks into their English, and survives through words, expressions, and habits of thought that refuse to be translated. The result is often a curious linguistic hotchpotch that may sound ridiculous to outsiders, but it reveals a deeper truth: you can stop speaking Kashmiri, yet Kashmiri is often unwilling to stop speaking through you.” For instance, “Unhu nay humaypoochatha.” (In the Kashmiri version of Urdu, it means ”They invited us”
If you are a Kashmiri, you immediately know what the speaker means. If you are not, you are likely wondering whether someone asked a question or conducted a survey. In fact, what the speaker means is that they were invited somewhere. Somewhere between the mountains of Kashmir and the grammar of Urdu, the invitation lost its way. This may seem like a harmless linguistic quirk. Still, it points towards something far more serious: the gradual erosion of Kashmiri, one of South Asia’s oldest and richest languages, by the very people who inherited it.
The evidence is everywhere.
Take the Kashmiri expression “tymkhaayekathiy”. One may loosely translate it as “he forgot his promise” or “he failed to keep his word”, but something essential is lost in the journey. Yet many Kashmiris, while speaking Urdu, render it literally as “usnebaat hi khaayi”. To an Urdu speaker, the phrase sounds awkward and unfamiliar. The meaning survives, but the elegance does not. Like much of Kashmiri, the expression carries emotions and cultural nuances that refuse to travel neatly into another language.
Or take the beloved Kashmiri expression “Trathpade use”. Literally, it may be rendered as “may a thunderbolt strike him”, but every Kashmiri knows it means much more than that. Depending on the situation, it can convey irritation, disbelief, frustration, or even playful exasperation. Translate it word for word into Urdu or English, and it suddenly sounds less like an expression and more like a weather forecast. The meaning remains, but the charm disappears.
The same applies to the word “wahm”. Every Kashmiri instantly understands what someone means when they exclaim, “mujewahmhogaya”. Dictionaries may offer substitutes such as shock, surprise, disbelief, or bewilderment, but none quite capture the feeling. The meaning can be translated; the emotion cannot. Like many Kashmiri words, “wahm” occupies a space that other languages can describe only approximately.
And this is precisely the point.
Languages do not merely translate words. They encode experiences.
A Kashmiri breakfast is not simply tea and bread. It is Noon Chai accompanied by girda, lawasa, kulcha, telvor, and tchot. One may translate these as bread, flatbread, bagel-like bread, or bakery products, but every Kashmiri knows something essential has been lost in the process. These words carry centuries of culinary memory, neighbourhood bakeries, family mornings, winter conversations, and cultural belonging. They evoke the sight of people queueing outside a kandur’s shop at dawn, the aroma of freshly baked bread mingling with Noon Chai, and a way of life that cannot be neatly packaged into a dictionary definition. They are not merely names of food; they are fragments of a shared cultural memory.
The tragedy is that many educated Kashmiris increasingly relegate Kashmiri to the kitchen, the village, and the conversations of ageing relatives, while reserving Urdu and English for schools, offices, newspapers, and public life. Yet language is not a coat that can be removed at will. Even when speaking in borrowed tongues, Kashmiris continue to think, feel, and structure their thoughts in Kashmiri. It slips back into their speech through idioms, grammar, and expressions, quietly reminding them of a linguistic inheritance they have never truly left behind.
The result is a curious linguistic hybrid that often puzzles outsiders and amuses them in equal measure.
But the laughter is not the real problem. The real problem is what it reveals: a community slowly losing confidence in its own voice.
A language spoken only at home eventually stops being spoken altogether.
What makes this loss particularly tragic is that the most powerful human emotions emerge naturally in the mother tongue. Love is often first spoken of in it. Grief cries through it. Humour sparkles in it. Anger erupts in it. It is the language of childhood memories, family stories, lullabies, and reprimands. Long before we learn grammar, we learn to feel through it, which is why no later language, however fluent, ever settles quite as deeply into the soul.
Anyone who has witnessed a genuinely angry Kashmiri knows this truth. The moment emotions become intense, Urdu and English are politely shown the door, and Kashmiri takes over. The words come straight from the heart, unfiltered and immediate. There is a catharsis in the mother tongue that no second or third language can fully provide. It cleanses emotion because it is woven into memory itself. The anger sounds more authentic, the humour more spontaneous, and even affection more sincere. In moments when pretence falls away, people instinctively return to the language that shaped their earliest understanding of the world.
This is why it is called a mother tongue.
The language in which a child first learns affection, fear, comfort, and belonging leaves marks too deep for any later language to replace. When we lose a language, we do not merely lose vocabulary. We lose ways of seeing. We lose humour that cannot be translated. We lose proverbs that compress generations of wisdom into a single line. We lose the verses of Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon, Sheikhul Alam, and Mahjoor, besides many others, in their original cadence. We lose cultural memories that no translation can adequately preserve.
The danger is not that the Kashmiri language will disappear tomorrow. The danger is that it will survive only as fragments: a few household expressions, a few affectionate insults, a few bakery names, and a handful of nostalgic words remembered by future generations who can no longer speak the language fluently.
That is how languages die, not suddenly, but politely. One generation decides not to teach it. The next understands it but does not speak it. The third remembers only a few words. By the fourth, the language exists mainly in academic papers and museum exhibits.
Perhaps it is high time to reverse the process. At least write in Kashmiri. Read Kashmiri. Resurrect Joke in Kashmiri. Argue in Kashmiri. Teach it to children without apology. Speak it not as a relic of the past but as a language fully capable of carrying the future.
Because the day a people begin to feel embarrassed by their own language is the day they begin to forget themselves.
And that, to borrow a phrase every Kashmiri understands perfectly, would be a civilisational trath.
The writer is a research scholar at Lucknow University, a Kashmiri speaker who hopes that future generations will inherit more than just translations
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