From the Readers

Importance of mother tongue

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-13 07:59

Comment on "Chinese opportunity for US" (China Daily, June 30)

My introduction to and knowledge of China started in the 1950s while I was a college student. Having written an essay on the comparative economic development of China and India till the 1960s at an American university for my master's, I kept up my interest in Chinese affairs as a journalist and writer. But my visual contact with the land began with my picking up the China Daily of June 30 as I boarded my first flight to Beijing from New Delhi.

I was thrilled to read a letter under the heading "Chinese opportunity for US". The writer, Bill Costello, says that the US should embrace the opportunity being offered by China to learn about its culture and language to take advantage of business opportunities offered by Sino-US trade ties.

Although India is growing at a pace near that of China, I cannot imagine anyone counseling Americans to learn Hindi or any other Indian language to further their business prospects. Rather, it is the other way around, Indians are being urged to ignore their own language(s), even within the country, in favor of English even though there is no hope that the masses (more than 1 billion people) will ever acquire the grasp required to know enough business English to participate in the international arena. As a result, the younger generation is losing out on both languages.

In China, the pride in the Chinese language is manifest everywhere. Road signs in Beijing, for example, have Chinese characters written in as large a type as English. In contrast, in New Delhi names in Hindi are written in a smaller type than in English. It reveals an attitude. In India subservience to a colonial imposition has been accepted as inevitable, often with tragic or amusing results. The loss of the mother tongue will seriously retard India's prospects.

Rohit Handa, via e-mail

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(China Daily 07/13/2010 page9)