So says Prof. N S Raghunath, HoD, Sciences & Humanities, Regional Institute of Education. As he put it, English has grown into a killer language, decimating many regional languages. Having said this the professor concedes that we can’t do without English. Students need to master it to be able to face today’s challenges. What’s worse, cutthroat competition in the corporate sector demands native fluency in English.
(Call centre jobs not merely requires that you affect American accent, but also anglicize your name - Mac, Steve, Stella or anything but Indian-sounding.)
Prof. Raghunath’s observations were made at a seminar on English language teaching, hosted by Mysore’s Yuvaraja College (22/3/06). The social sciences professor says the hostile attitude of some academics to English language teaching betrays lack of touch with reality, which is detrimental to students. He reckons that 60 percent students with 10 years’ exposure to English are unable either to read or speak English with a degree of confidence.
The point, as I see it, is it is rather naïve to believe that promoting English works against the growth of other languages. The reason for their ‘decimation’ (as Prof.Raghunath terms it) lies elsewhere. People root for English, perhaps, to the neglect of their mother tongue, not because of love for English, but out of an enlightened self-interest; to gain proficiency in the language of global communication. How far can one get without English in this tech./market driven world that is getting increasingly globalised ?
It is an absolute reality. Whatever love/fanatism we have towards mother tongue/vernacular, English has undeniably been accepted as a "language-leader" worldwide . The balanced approach i would love to have is the three language formula of English+Kannada+Hindi.
English has not decimated the local languages, it's not like some one held a gun to one's head to learn English. I like the three language theory. Pres. Bill Clinton wanted to make a two language system in the US, English and Spanish and he thought Americans would be better served if they knew more than one language. There were no hi-tech or call center jobs when we grew up, but don't we read, write and speak good English?
If English was indeed a killer language, then how come in France you can't get by in this language and in most Latin American countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, San Salvador, Nicaragua and many other places, how come nobody speaks any English? When I visited Honduras, it was really difficult because starting from Airport Immigration, not one soul spoke English. It's another matter that I knew a smattering of Spanish. It helped when I traveled through this region. How come English has not penetrated these places and killed their language? Also, think about it. None of these countries that I have mentioned above have ever been in the forefront of technology or have industrialized economies and are better known as "banana republics". Why? They ain't good in English matey, thats why!
Just felt like peppering the discussion with this one from my collection of essays.
Politics of English
WILL DURANT elucidated a subject so dry as philosophy by narrating it with the felicity of one’s grandmother weaving a fairy tale. If anybody else is to be similarly credited with success in achieving the ease and elegance of expression in a subject that does not have general appeal, it must be Fowler. Look at this vignette from his Modern English. The English speaking world may be divided into 1) Those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is 2) Those who do not know but care very much 3) Those who know and condemn 4) Those who know and approve and 5) Those who know and distinguish.
Not long ago emanated the pain-alleviating news from the homeland of English that the age-old taboo on splitting the infinitive has been cast aside. The relaxation of the ban made instant nonsense of Fowler’s categorization. I felt euphoric like an East German in unified Germany for I had clearly belonged to the second category. The conundrum called the split infinitive had terrified me and split my head the precise way I once broke coconuts to appease the Goddess of Learning. The carte blanche meant an instant elevation from my plebeian status. This personal aggrandizement of being catapulted to a higher rung in the linguistic evolutionary ladder notwithstanding, I somehow felt that the announcement had a populist undercurrent. It was even reminiscent of the Indian situation where unauthorized layouts are allowed to mushroom before regularizing them in an election year by vote-seeking politicians. Cynics might jump to read meaning into the regularization of the practice of splitting the infinitive and dub it as an attempt to perpetuate the linguistic hegemony of the inheritors of the legacy of the former East India Company.
Even the more recent development of the Oxford English Dictionary inviting readers from all over the world similarly offers scope to taste it with a pinch of salt. All said and done, I still feel the only way of nurturing a language is to adopt a liberal approach and borrow from other languages. Just as urbanization of a region necessarily involves participation of people from elsewhere, a growing city has its attendant problems, particularly those related to slums and pollution. If you want tranquillity, go to countryside and breathe its fresh air. Read Sanskrit which has all its pristine purity and unassailable virginity.
