It's a fallacy that every language holds secret feelings

Languages may not really encode unique emotions but it's tempting to believe in such magic

- MANU JOSEPH

Usually, when a person speaks a language poorly, it is a sign that they speak some other language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak any language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I, too, have lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, even though I used to think in both Tamil and Malayalam once. It is hard to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongues have died inside us and our children do not know them at all.

Yet, I am unable to mourn a dying language. This is because beyond the nostalgia of heritage, the broad reasons why people mourn the demise of a language are based on false assumptions.

There is a view that every language encodes a unique human emotion or a way of thinking, which cannot be decoded by another language. I want to believe this because I want there to be magic in this world, but from what I have seen, there is nothing emotionally unique about any language, and the lament about dying languages is overstated because we are afraid of death in general.