I met Joe in the British city of Birmingham — a confident young Sikh with neatly cropped hair, stylish trainers, and a quick grin. “My friends prefer to call me Joe,” he told me, explaining that his full name was Joginder Singh, but it sounded “too heavy” in local circles. He claimed to speak five languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, and Arabic. Impressive, I thought.
But when I casually asked him in Punjabi to name his parents’ village in Punjab, he blinked. “Sorry, what?” he said. He didn’t understand the question or the language. It became clear that Joe’s Punjabi was, at best, ornamental. He knew nothing of his ancestral geography, nothing of the land his name came from. The loss wasn’t just linguistic, it was existential.