Promoting Dzongkha has been our long-term policy since it became our national language. From briefly making Dzongkha the medium of instruction for subjects traditionally taught in English, such as history, and mandating it as a compulsory subject in national-level exams, to enforcing its use in all official settings through executive orders — we’ve tried all. Have these policies promoted Dzongkha or endeared it to young people?

Before anything else, Dzongkha is a language like any other language. And, like any other language, it evolves, or it must evolve, in a dynamic social milieu, shedding some of its antiquated formalism, acquiring new vocabulary, and broadening itself to accommodate the evolving complexity in globalised interactions, sciences, and modern culture. English rode from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton down to Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Stephen Hawking the same evolutionary route.

Dzongkha tries to evolve. Many young people don’t observe the formality and ornateness of past usage. But we do not always look at these evolutions kindly. Consequently, we’ve built an image of Dzongkha as a language with a rigid form that can only be altered with approval from institutions responsible for coining words and publishing grammar texts. Our aversion to loanwords hasn’t helped either; it’s encumbered Dzongkha’s ability to grow apace with advancements in science, philosophies, and modern culture. This stunted evolution has given English with its prodigious borrowing an upper hand in dislodging languages that fail to evolve. Then, authorities enforce it, lest the language should erode completely.

But let’s not snipe at the well-intended institutions’ ways of promoting Dzongkha. Below, I briefly describe areas we’ve overlooked as far as Dzongkha promotion is concerned.

Produce literature, not

dictionaries

The former Dzongkha Development Commission has produced dictionaries in their multifarious iterations — the Dzongkha dictionary, the Dzongkha-English dictionary, its reverse, and electronic dictionaries. But dictionaries (speaking as a person who once inanely attempted to commit the student’s Oxford dictionary to mind) don’t make you a skilful language user.

Literature does. But, for all the splurge in dictionaries, literary creation receives a pittance, if any. A state interested in promoting a language must support literary creation in that language. Only through literary creation can we test Dzongkha’s dynamism and its range and richness to express the multiplicity of ideas and concepts in a style intelligible to the laity. Should the state subsidise writers, and how? Yes, and I explain my thinking below.

Bhutan’s writing market is minuscule, and for Dzongkha, that market is entirely local. So, the daring one must muster to spend months researching and writing materials in Dzongkha for the current market is economically foolish. The least we can do for a writer willing to write something in simplified, accessible Dzongkha is help him/her to foot their bills at least for the duration it takes to research and write it.

I am not talking in terms of percentage of GDP here. Writing fellowships and residency programmes can provide that assurance. But where are such programmes in our country? The government could help the colleges in the Royal University create residency programmes or fellowships to provide writers-in-residence with a roof, a writing space, and a decent allowance. A writer in residence, while mainly focusing on creating a publishable work, can teach a few classes in Dzongkha composition to the students taking such a course. Better still is to open composition classes to all interested students from any discipline; good writers can come from any discipline. Universities elsewhere have such programmes, and many writers and books are born out of them.

Writers-in-residence may work on different projects, ranging from fiction, biography, translation, poetry, and so on. Why, a writing fellow in poetry, for example, may write a book of free verse in Dzongkha, liberating Dzongkha poetry from the confines of traditional meter and prosody. The translation is another exciting area. Bringing high-quality works from other languages into Dzongkha can not only expand the Dzongkha reading materials but also expose Bhutanese audiences to new writing styles and ways of using Dzongkha for different genres.

I’d queue up to buy a Dzongkha translation of Raymond Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’. But that’s a far cry when we don’t even have a Dzongkha version of such an important work as ‘The History of Bhutan’ by Lopen Karma Phuntsho. Many literate Bhutanese whose education is mainly in Choekey or  Dzongkha are denied access to a very high-quality scholarship on Bhutanese history. This is but the tip of the iceberg. Dare I suggest the money we put into creating dictionaries be diverted to funding fellowships for Dzongkha writers?

Teaching Dzongkha

as a language

We unjustly place the onus of promoting Dzongkha on our students, who see their syllabi changed and the subject weights in exams haphazardly readjusted. State patronage of a language is a blessing, but it should not turn into a nosy aunt’s hug. What we do must endear the language to the users. Is the way we teach the language to the young people endearing Dzongkha to them? Not particularly — I’m afraid. Dzongkha is presented, perhaps rightly, as a sanctified language by virtue of its sharing the script with Choekey. As a result, Dzongkha comes to the kids in its sartorial splendour of spirituality.

Students study Gyalsey Laglen for Dzongkha literature in the ninth and tenth classes.  This splendid poetry is treated more the way a religious canon is treated and less the way a piece of literature should be treated in a literature class. Students mug up the text, argue its spiritual themes, and even recite it, while overlooking its marvellous literary quality. The verses’ remarkable aspects – the rich metaphors, the captivating beauty of the stanzas, and the writer’s masterful handling of profound themes in ordinary language – are all ignored.

Deconstructing technicalities is too advanced for the level, some may argue, argumentative as we are. But a language’s potential for beauty, flexibility, and richness remains hidden unless we use the language not just for official documents but also for fiction, poetry, and essays. To do that, we must learn from what is already written. Perhaps it will help Dzongkha if we relax on the spiritual side a bit to focus on the principles of composition.

Institutions must not police the language use; they must at best document changes. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is a handy example. It observes the way people use the English language and updates the social conventions of language use and new coinages. Languages change with time; new words are coined, new ways of expression are accepted, and new uses for old forms are invented.

When scientists declared that Pluto was no longer a planet, the noun Pluto saw a functional shift, that is, the noun was now repurposed to act as a verb as well. Then, to be plutoed was to get demoted or devalued.

Are we willing such daring in our language? I mean, simply, can we perhaps not mind, say, jigs as an adjective in daily interactions despite its plebeian origin in the peccadillo of the millennials? English, seen as Dzongkha’s threat, is what it is not because of the hubris of sticklers who burn with indignation when you end a sentence with a preposition or attempt boldly to split an infinitive. It is a product of evolution, instead.

Without serious initiatives to create literature and endear the language to the younger generation, token gestures and exhortations will only cast Dzongkha as a pampered child of overbearing parents. We want others to appreciate our kid, admire her eloquence, and be awed by her cleverness while locking her up in her room all the time, lest she should ingest dirt and pick slang on the street. But it’s the street where you’ll ingest starlight, too.

Contributed by

Benu, Australia