Srinagar, Feb. 4 -- Every age invents its own tools, and every civilisation names them. Names are not merely labels; they are acts of ownership, identity, and intellectual confidence. Yet in Kashmir today, a quiet but serious linguistic question is unfolding before us. New inventions enter our lives every day, but they arrive wrapped almost exclusively in English. We use them, depend on them, even teach them, yet we rarely name them in our own mother tongue. This reality raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: is linguistics, particularly Kashmiri linguistics, failing to keep pace with modern innovation?

Historically, Kashmiri has never been a weak or inadequate language. On the contrary, it has demonstrated remarkable adaptabili...