The paradox of this age is represented in many forms, one of the prominent ones being language. I opened the newspaper to find that another Indian –American child has won the Spelling Bee, the eighth to do so in eleven years. The father reportedly said that this was because of the emphasis on education. On the other hand, we have a generation of Indians who are accustomed to ‘fucking’, ‘bitching’ and the lot. So let us consider the fucking bitching Indian. I find this personally disgusting. I was one of them for a brief period of a couple of months some time back. Used such terms a lot. Instead of thinking ‘what are you doing?’ angrily, I began to think, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’. I thought it was better and more or less benign than swearing in Malayalam. Well, there is also the point that I don’t know how to swear much. Then there came the realization that English or Malayalam, swearing isn’t good just for fun, even though it might be in my mind. There is a level of decency that I have to keep while interacting with others and that shouldn’t include negative incursions from any language.
Again, consider the way Indians use English language. We have quite made it our own, constantly vernacularising it. Though it is in an entirely different way than how the Brits intended with ‘filtering theory’. The other side of the coin is where a section says that English should be English. We cannot deviate from the printed language of Webster’s and Oxford, even though usages like slum dog were shortlisted to be included in them. They feel that in a world where the osmotic balance is tilting in favor of vernacular incursion, the Anglo balance ought to be maintained. In a nation where around a hundred million people use English as their second language, it is a pretty strict restriction to keep, forgetting the evolution of language and ordering it to stay static.
One of the examples of vernacularising English is evident when we ‘pass out’ of college. I used this term once to an English professor and he immediately chastised me. I went home disillusioned as I had always thought that I had good command over this language. But hardly had a week gone by when I saw the exact same term used in the exact same context in a news paper article. That is when I began wondering about language and how we change it through daily use. Every day, like every other aspect of society, language changes. The effect maybe miniscule in the short term, but in the long run, it has the same effect as the literary evolution from Chaucer to Bukowski. It is just the same as vernacular English was once deemed unsuitable to write seriously.
But one point to be added here is that nowadays, changes are taking place rather rapidly than any great writer would have dared imagine. The diasporas of every race are everywhere. As such is the case, it becomes increasingly easy for language to seep through geo-political boundaries. A major contribution is globalization, which achieved its maximal thrust in the recent years and continues to act as the arbitrator for an accelerated transformation.
In India’s case, there is no uniform assimilation of English into its fold. India itself being diverse, the absorption of an alien language is itself in different measures. But what I love most about this integration is that it simplifies the language, breaks down the components to a level where every person can utilize it. What remains is what the pragmatics conveys through a bottom-up process.
We have this quirk here down south. We ‘ify’ it. We ‘nokki-fy’, we ‘thalli-fy’ etc. There are other forms of integration too. For being sentimental, we just use ‘senti’. It is a noun and a verb both. What is the use of millennia of cultural integration if we choose not to enjoy its advantages? The English sure have. What is ‘coir’ if not a variation of ‘kayar’? Dacoit, jungle, loot etc are just some examples of such incorporation. The sentinels of language purity seldom attend to the evolution and interpretation of socio cultural processes in which language plays a huge role. It is like the gene pool, only that we are collectively enriching it by throwing in usages and coining new words. Some sink to the depths with disuse while others are fished out, polished and put to work.
Like Samuel Johnson said, ‘Language is the dress of thought’. I sure am glad I don’t wear nineteenth century gowns.
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