Is there alternative to Dzongkha?
They must have made a preliminary assessment by now that Dzongkha is not a convenient language Bhutanese can hold for a long, owing not only to linguistic diversity of the country but also differences in meaning and pronunciation of Dzongkha.
Dzongkha changes with village and standardization of the language for decades failed to yield any substantial results. Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC) is one of the major government agencies receiving bulky amount of support from the state every year. The other languages receive not a penny.
The participants at the current national conference on Dzongkha pointed out the fact that the national language, declared in 1969, cannot compete with English. They said, not only the general people, most specifically youngster, are more inclined to English but even the ministries use English for communication.
However, there are also voices that Dzongkha must replace English in usage at least for official purpose but remained mum over its consequences on speakers of other languages.
The nationalists opine that most forms, which are available only in English now, must be converted to Dzongkha. And the national must not remain just for transfer, appointment, and office orders documents.
The greatest obstacle for Dzongkha usage, is and will be, lack of senior government officials and politicians lacking perfection in Dzongkha — the more harder for those coming from other linguistic groups. Appointment of a Dzongkha officer in each ministry also did not produce any fruitful results.
But the most welcome view is from Tandin Dorji, a DDC chief program officer, who at the workshop, said that Bhutanese citizens should be offered a bilingual choice when communicating with or within the government.
The language has struggling time henceforth. Most young people do not want to learn Dzongkha beyond personal communication. The social belief that person studying Dzongkha will have low social status compelled young people to opt for the international language — English.
The DDC is still in mood to force citizens to learn the national language not just for speaking but also for writing. To this goal, the education ministry has been asked to introduce more subjects in Dzongkha. Only last year, under immense pressure from teachers, students and guardians, the government revised its decision to teach history in Dzongkha.
Though the national language has been upgraded substantially in last few decades, lack of adequate vocabulary pushes it backward. While preparing the constitution, the DDC experts, failing to find meaning in Dzongkha of the numerous legal and constitutional terms, purchased words from Tibetan language, which made it very difficult for general people to learn the constitution. Even today, the native Dzongkha speakers, who lack English knowledge, do not understand many provisions of the constitution.
The effort to inculcate Dzongkha knowledge through force is likely to change, at least for toddlers. Dzongkha curriculum for classes between pre-primary and III have been proposed to be changed to end rote learning of this language. Yet the process has been tedious and time consuming, a teacher unlikely to handle the classroom teaching. There is already shortage of Dzongkha teachers, very few from new generation willing to join this profession.
The only good options for national policy makers is to sideline the use of Dzongkha in favor of English, the language in which Bhutanese have already made their mark.