Srinagar, May 28 -- You don't need to walk through a university gate or open a dusty grammar book to see where language really lives. It's there in the chatter of school kids switching between Kashmiri and Hindi mid-sentence, in the Urdu phrases tucked between English status updates, in the auntie at the market giving directions with a mix of all three. In Kashmir, like in much of the world, language doesn't stay still. It flows, adapts, and reinvents itself, often faster than we can measure.

And yet, each time a young person hesitates in their mother tongue, someone sounds the alarm. "We're losing our culture," they say. "They don't speak like we did." But language doesn't disappear just because it sounds different. It changes because p...