The Language a Billboard Speaks
Walk down any high street in India and pay attention to the language the city speaks back to you. The hoardings are in English. The cafes have English names. The food delivery apps on the phone in your hand, Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto, are spelt in English even when the words underneath are Indian. The shops with the brightest signage almost always belong to brands that arrived from somewhere else. The languages that built these cities are still spoken inside homes, but they are slowly being pushed out of the public, commercial, modern surface of life.
This is the quiet shape of what some linguists now call the “English-only” problem. Brands, in their pursuit of global scale, are choosing one language to speak in, and that language is almost always English.
The choice looks neutral, but it is not. Repeated millions of times across packaging, advertising, websites, and apps, it slowly trains a generation to associate modernity, ambition, and aspiration with the English language. While the other languages stay alive in memory, they lose their place in the present.
What the Numbers Say
The scale of language loss in our century is increasing. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger estimates that around “40 per cent of the world’s roughly 6,700 languages are at some level of endangerment, and at least 244 languages have already gone extinct since 1950”
Researchers working on the Endangered Languages Catalogue at the University of Hawai'i project that close to half of all languages currently spoken are likely to disappear by the end of this century.
The vast majority of these are indigenous, regional, or minority languages whose speakers are slowly shifting to dominant global languages.
Branding is not the only force driving this loss, but colonisation, urbanisation, migration, and education policy all play larger roles. But branding is the everyday face of the same phenomenon. It is the part of the language structure that ordinary people see, hear, and absorb most often. When children grow up in a world where every cool product, every aspirational app, and every fashionable cafe speaks English, the slow message is that their own language belongs to an older, less exciting world.
India’s Quiet Paradox
India is, on paper, one of the most multilingual countries in the world. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 official languages. The 2011 Census recorded 121 languages spoken by ten thousand or more people, and Ganesh Devy’s People’s Linguistic Survey of India, the largest non-government language survey ever conducted in the country, documented over 780 living languages, of which roughly 250 are at risk of extinction within the next fifty years. And yet the brand produced by India’s startup looks remarkably monolingual.
Look at the names that have come to define modern Indian consumption: Swiggy, Zomato, Ola, CRED, Nykaa, Zepto, BYJU’s, Flipkart, boAt.
The script is Roman. The marketing voice is English. The cultural register is global. Hindi or regional languages may appear in advertising voice-overs and packaging, but the brand identity itself is firmly English-coded. A teenager will engage with these brands in exactly the same language, and that language will not be theirs.
When Companies “Come to India”
In the last decade, almost every major global company has announced some form of “India strategy” — Apple opening flagship stores in Mumbai and Delhi, Netflix building Hindi and regional-language originals, McDonald’s tailoring its menu to vegetarian and Jain palates, and IKEA designing smaller furniture for Indian apartments. This is often described as localisation, and it is real to a point. But it is worth asking what kind of localisation is actually taking place.
Apple’s India advertising frequently features Indian faces, Indian streets, and Indian celebrities, but its product names, interface, and core marketing voice remain English.
Netflix’s Indian-language content is genuine and important, yet the platform’s brand, navigation, and editorial framing operate in English by default. McDonald’s adapts its food but not its name; IKEA adapts its furniture but not its catalogue voice.
Most multinational “localisation” in India looks like translation pasted on top of English words, rather than a reimagining of the brand in the language of the people it serves. The deeper architecture remains English; only the surface flexes.
What Gets Lost When a Word Disappears
The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who famously stopped writing in English at the height of his international fame, argued that “Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.” His point was that you cannot replace one language with another without also replacing the worldview, the memory, and the inner life that the first language carried. A language is not just a set of words; it is a way of dividing time, of naming relationships, of describing weather, of gesturing at the sacred.
Some words simply cannot survive translation. The Bengali abhimaan sits somewhere between hurt pride and tender sulking, a feeling held only between people who love each other; English flattens it to “sulk.” The Gujarati vahaalu carries a particular warmth of belovedness that “dear” cannot hold. The Tamil anbu is not the same as “love.” When a generation grows up branding its experience in English, these feelings do not vanish, but the words that once named them precisely begin to fade. The thought becomes harder to think.
The British linguist David Crystal, who wrote the foundational book Language Death in 2000, has long argued that every language carries a unique cultural and intellectual inheritance from medicinal plant knowledge to oral histories.
National Geographic’s reporting on the Wikitongues project has documented this loss in detail across communities from Slovenia to Siberia.
Pushing Back: Laws, Communities, and Brands That Chose Differently
Some governments have decided that languages need legal scaffolding to survive in commercial life. France’s 1994 Toubon Law requires the French language to be present in advertising, product packaging, and workplace communication, and mandates translation when foreign words are used in public contexts. Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, enacted in 1977, makes French the predominant language of public signage and business operation, and is widely credited with stabilising French in a North American sea of English.
These laws are sometimes mocked as protectionist, but their underlying claim is hard to dismiss: if you do not legislate space for a language in commercial life, the market will quietly evict it.
More hopeful counterexamples come from communities themselves. In New Zealand, the Maori language was spoken by only about five per cent of Maori schoolchildren in the 1970s; today, after decades of revitalisation work and government recognition, that figure has grown to roughly twenty-five per cent. Hawaiian, which had fewer than 2,000 first-language speakers in the 1970s, now has over 18,000, largely because the state ensured the language was taught in schools from preschool onwards.
India has its own quieter version of this story.
Krutrim and Sarvam, two Indian AI startups, are training large language models on twenty regional Indian languages, betting that the next generation of digital products will be multilingual or irrelevant.
Older brands offer the same lesson: Maggi has thrived in India for decades by speaking in Hindi advertising, even though its corporate parent is Swiss.
Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign succeeded precisely because it printed local first names on bottles in dozens of countries, abandoning uniformity.
A Small Refusal
The English-only problem will not be solved by any single billboard or any single brand. But it will not be solved without them either. Every product packaged in two languages instead of one, every workshop poster that carries Bengali alongside English, every children’s book sold with bilingual covers, every onboarding screen offered in Marathi, each of these is a small refusal of the default. Small refusals add up to the only force capable of slowing language extinction: continued, ordinary, daily use.
The grandmother walking through the supermarket aisle will not be persuaded to keep her language alive.
She will be persuaded by whether the world her grandchild grows up inside still has room for the word abhimaan, or vahaalu, or anbu. That room is built one brand decision, one billboard, one bedtime story at a time.
References
- UNESCO. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. https://www.unesco.org
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1986.
- Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Devy, Ganesh. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India. Bhasha Research and Publication Centre. https://peopleslinguisticsurvey.org
- National Geographic. “Saving the World’s Dying and Disappearing Languages.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com
- Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. http://www.endangeredlanguages.com
- Visual Capitalist. “The State of the World’s 7,168 Living Languages.” https://www.visualcapitalist.com
- Government of France. Loi Toubon (Law No. 94-665 of 4 August 1994), relative to the use of the French language.
- Government of Quebec. Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), 1977.
- Census of India 2011, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner. https://censusindia.gov.in
- Built In. “Top Startup Companies in India.” https://builtin.com