Re: [GRN] Pamphlets

[John de Figueiredo]

Under the Kadambas the court language was Kannada because they infiltrated into Goa from Karnataka and took over. But Konkani survived. Vijayanagara ruled Goa for some time and mandated the use of their languages, Kannada and Telugu. But Konkani survived. Bijapur made Marathi the official language, partly because Yusuf Adil Khsn (the “Idalcao” of the Portuguese) was married to a Marathi princess. (To his credit, it was his only wife even though he could have had more than one, being a Muslim.) But Konkani survived. In the 16th and 17th centuries  the Portuguese tried to impose their language. But Konkani survived. (To their credit the Portuguese eventually recognized this was an error and tried to encourage the Goans to promote Konkani, but for a long time their appeal fell into deaf ears.) And Konkani continued to flourish. Is Konkani going to disappear now? If it does, it will be buried in the same grave as Escola Normal, Liceu, Escola Medica, Instituto Vasco da Gama, Academia de Música, and Orquestra Sinfónica de Goa. And we can all sing the Requiem to what is meant to be a Goan.  John Sent from my iPhone On Dec 5, 2023, at 3:40 PM, fredericknoronha <fredericknoro...@gmail.com> wrote: The wider issue here is: Is Goa a monolingual or multilingual space? Everyone pushing for diversity seems to be promoting monolingualism (or, at least that one language is somehow superior). As long as it's the language they themselves favour :-) FN PS: Even the claim about Goans "finally hav(ing) their mother tongue recognised" is a complex and very debatable one, given the realities of script and dialect, and what OLA 1987 actually meant to the Konkani language itself. On Tuesday 5 December 2023 at 20:04:01 UTC+5:30 John M. de Figueiredo wrote: Not all Goans pursued the English language. Some did, others did not. Some pursued the Portuguese language, others pursued Marathi. English was never the dominant language in Goa before the annexation. It was the colonial language of the rest of India, that’s why it was imposed on the Goans. The switch from Portuguese to English was not an easy pass. It was very traumatic. Entire institutions, both public and private, were closed (private out of necessity). People lost their jobs. Had it not been for the annexation, English would not have been one of the dominant languages in Goa. These are the facts. The rest (such as “Portuguese lost out for very good reasons”) is politics.  And it took protests, demonstrations, even deaths for the Goans to finally have their mother tongue (“dudh bhas”) recognized. If this is not forcing and imposition, what is? Certainly it contradicted Jawaharlal Nehru’s promise that “Goa will  continue to be an open window to the Portuguese culture”. John  -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to goa-research-net+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/98d3daac-8818-413a-ba31-56e5e0838a85n%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to goa-research-net+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/35EB58FC-77AC-478F-B002-B1253E744984%40sbcglobal.net.