malai nepali ramro aundaina!!

Do you fall in the category jaslai nepali ramro aundaina?? Hope not!! But I am preety sure that you may have come across friends who use this sentence. We have been using Nepali language from the day we started speaking and our first words spoken were probably aama or baba, isn't it? Or is there anyone who said daddy or mummy? Must be rare case!

Its very funny to see people speak the language for the past 19 years or more and still say "malai nepali ramro aundaina!" as if they are expert in english but they aren't. Actually tiniharulai english pani ramro aundaina!!

Slowly and slowly, we are degrading our language. I see in my friend circle and rarely find a one who reads nepali magazines and news paper. Some even say they feel bored reading nepali. While I was writing this article, I asked one of my friend to explain why he never read nepali articles and paper and his reply was nepali words are complicated and time consuming, whereas english is very easy!!

Do you agree with this? Is nepali complicated? This may not look like a very big issue but I really feel shame and little while I hear this from my Nepali friends who grew up in Nepali society. Once I was so much amazed when one of my friend couldn't read the news paper title "hamro prajasakti". If the same goes on then a day will come when we wont have any nepali papers being published in our state, no nepali news channels, no nepali songs been played and then what would we say our mother tongue is? Neplish [Nepali+English]?

One more funny thing I remember is my school days when I was a kid. We were charged fine if we spoke nepali in school compound. There could be other ways to improve English among the students but charging fine for speaking mother language doesn't seem quite obvious to me. Yeah it has some advantages but the darker side I saw is slowly those students will start developing a negative feeling towards Nepali [I can say this confidently with my personal experience].

I am not going against any systems but what I feel is that we should preserve our language and give value to it. I feel youths should come forward and take some kinds of initiative.

Some facts to look upon:

• There are 17 million nepali speakers worldwide.

• There are an estimated 500,000 Nepali speakers in Sikkim and somewhat more than that in Darjeeling.


• In all there are millions of Nepali speakers in India. [read more......]
  

I am proud to be a Nepali.
~ Amir Bhandari, Soreng