Mahmoud Sabahi - Radio Zamaneh - February 21, 2015
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| Mahmoud Sabahi |
Now, after many years, I am convinced that no one has uttered more nonsense and exaggerated statements about language—especially about the mother tongue—than those sitting in language academies.
Leave language alone, leave culture alone, leave the people and their language alone, abandon authoritative language if you truly desire a richer culture and a flourishing language. But that’s not your goal. Instead, you pursue another kind of dominance and superiority. This is why you grow enraged over mother tongues and the education in these languages. You, the fathers and sons who seek the origins of language not in life itself, but in the empty rhetoric and exaggerated boasts of your ancestors.
Let me be blunt: those who fear the mother tongue and continuously warn of its dangers are the same ones who unconsciously dread the rise of maternal values in society.
If the mother tongue is truly a language absorbed from the mother’s relationship with her child, then it is not a language seeking to impose itself, dominate, or expand control over others. Rather, it is a language that pursues dialogue and creates opportunities for interaction and connection with others.
The mother tongue is full of superior natural experiences and learning, which the paternal language, as the official language, later suppresses because the father wishes to quickly end the child’s conversation with the mother in order to establish his social and political language and system in the child’s mind.
Why should we fear the mother tongue? Why should every social group not have the right to discover and perceive the world through their mother tongue? Doesn’t human understanding, development, and dialogue with others become more possible through the mother tongue—a language that communicates most profoundly through the maternal language, feminine language, imaginative language, the language of literature, and the language of music?
Language has often been called an instrument of thought, but I believe language is not merely a tool for thinking. Language is society, it is life, it is hatred, it is pain, it is love, it is resentment, it is joy; language is everything, which is why it can become a means of thinking.
I am strongly opposed to the use of the term “instrument of thought” for language because language cannot be reduced to a mere tool. Language is something beyond language, and this transcendence is most deeply and intensely revealed in the mother tongue, for in the mother tongue, a world opens up to us that no official or authoritative, paternal language can close.
Gradually, living in exile has confronted me with the truth that the mother tongue is the only language in which, if someone is deprived of speaking, they will become depressed and may even be destroyed. The mother tongue is not merely a simple means to fulfill needs; it is the totality of our emotions, our capacities and incapacities for a meaningful life, our entire ability to converse with ourselves, the world, society, and others.
We may be able to converse in other languages, but we have experienced that these other languages, even if we are proficient in them, are not truly our language, nor our true home. In these languages, we can only enter as guests.
It is true that our estrangement as exiled Iranians is not a withdrawal from our community or mother tongue, but from the official, paternal, repressive language and society—the very society that demands not only that we forget our mother tongue but insists that we speak and think in its imposed, fabricated language.
We receive our mother tongue from our mothers, making it a language filled with security, connection, a sense of freedom, and with songs and liberating melodies—all the wonderful things that turn the time of childhood into the fondest, most cherished memory.
The mother tongue is a language that gives life and liberation. There have been times when I felt either anger or deep joy in the society I live in, and in those moments, although I was speaking in another language, I found that Persian words leapt unconsciously from my lips, embracing me in a maternal hug.
At times, to express myself and my feelings satisfactorily, I have chosen to say something in Persian, my mother tongue, to someone who has never understood this language—a curse or a kind word—because, as I’ve realized, the mother tongue is not only a language through which I can defend my identity but also the only language through which I can truly manifest my existence. The mother tongue grants me a power that no other language can ever provide.
Thus, the mother tongue, above all, is the language of my freedom and security. In the world of this language, I not only gain unwritten individual and social legitimacy but also find it the only language in which I, through my mastery of it, rarely, if ever, feel confined or imprisoned by society.
With my mother tongue, I can live more fully with myself and less so with society without being alienated from the community or language. However, when I reside in another society and speak another language, as soon as I drift away, that language and society also distance themselves from me, and their presence loses its color and luster in me. Based on this, as I now experience myself, the mother tongue is not merely a source of linguistic diversity or vibrancy, as is often claimed, but the very essence of inner freedom, power, and security for the individual who thinks, speaks, loves, and resents in that language.
Therefore, when someone is deprived of learning, speaking, and listening in their mother tongue, they are effectively deprived of freedom, security, and social development. Indeed, the reason totalitarian states do not allow individuals and diverse social groups to be educated in their mother tongue is not for the advancement of culture and literature; rather, it is quite the opposite: their desire is to enforce social conformity and ultimately to suppress multiple possibilities, freedoms, and capacities. They simply wish to dominate, nothing more! This is the core of their mindset, even if they mask it in language that is embellished with benevolent reasoning to disguise their true intent.
The idea of calling the mother tongue a "first language" doesn’t quite resonate with me, as I have seen people whose primary language was different, yet their behavior, thoughts, emotions, and tastes stemmed from their mother tongue—even if they could no longer speak it fluently. Therefore, the significance of the mother tongue goes beyond being the first or second language, because it is only through this language that one can truly sing, dance, share one’s longing, and communicate one’s thoughts with others.
Sometimes, a writer may write in another language, but undoubtedly, they feel and think in their mother tongue. Otherwise, how would they have ever been able to think and write in the first place? More importantly, how would they have learned and benefited from this new, second or third language?
Yet, the mother tongue is not merely a doorway to those who speak the same language; it is a window to others, to different languages, to those who speak differently. If this window isn’t open, the mother tongue will inevitably decline and perish.
Thus, those who recognize the dignity and value of the mother tongue should not only oppose those who prohibit education in it. They should also stand against those who isolate language into an island cut off from other languages and communities, for it is only through dialogue and interaction with other languages that our mother tongue can become stronger, more enduring, and more fruitful.
Mahmoud Sabahi is a sociologist and researcher at Leipzig University.
Link to the original story in Farsi: https://www.radiozamaneh.com/206675