| Global variants of the language are alive and kicking in the city | |||
A woman steps into a sprawling new mall. “Excuse me,” says the woman security guard at the entrance, next to a global chain restaurant that sells burgers, and frisks her. It’s a three-storeyed mall, lined with stores that mostly sell designer brands. The woman wants a pair of fancy socks for her one-year-old. She walks into the first children’s store. “I want,” she says to the first salesman she encounters, in English, for the brand and the smartly uniformed salespersons intimidate her, “socks”. “How old?” the salesman asks. “One year,” she answers. “There. Newborn,” he directs her to the counter that, indeed, says “Newborn”. It has on display socks and other accessories for children up to five years. The mall and its consequences are everywhere. Calcutta is no exception. There is widespread fear that English as it was known for decades is going to be no more, as it is being replaced by the new robust global (read local) variants of English. Obituaries of the “original” language are being written. “This is not English as we have known it,” says language expert from the UK David Graddol, who was recently in the city. “The new language which is rapidly ousting the language of Shakespeare as the world’s lingua franca is English itself — English in its new global form,” he adds in his book English Next — Why Global English may mean the end of “English as a Foreign Language”. He has for company David Crystal, a British language expert, who believes that globally English will split and converge, with local variants leading to a World Standard Spoken English. Meanwhile, what of the new global English in Calcutta? It is doing quite well. Mainly as what Graddol describes a “near-universal basic skill”. As economic globalisation encourages the spread of English, English also encourages the spread of globalisation — so much so that it’s difficult to say which is which. The menu card of a respected south Indian eatery in central Calcutta, along with many types of dosas and uttappams, has a section called Happinezz Ice Cream Sodas, under which are listed drinks called Happinezz Zing and Black Cow. Black Cow! Who would want to drink a non-alcoholic drink called Black Cow? Text trouble As a skill, English is entitled to rough treatment and is getting it. Inflexions are dropped, not to mention the verbs. SMS and email messages can sound abrupt, almost rude. How does “u r entitle 2 ur opinion” sound? And which language is the Smiley? A near-universal basic skill? Perhaps there lies the most remarkable feature of global English. As the world enters a “post-post-colonial” stage, global English enjoys a freedom, in its ideas, in its form, from grammar, also perhaps from that old Western construct called logic — the message on an “export reject” T-shirt sold from a dump in Dalhousie reads “Night girl” and is picked up by a young man, for himself — that traditional English, organic as the language always was, never did enjoy. There are no rules, about the language, as teacher after teacher of functional English, which seems another name for global English — in the city will attest. English language courses are becoming more popular by the day, bringing under their rubric not only the age-old “spoken English”, but also the basic English courses being taught at the many management and engineering schools in the city. “We do not try to teach all students correct English, not the poor ones certainly,” says an English language teacher in the city attached to a management institute who will not be named. “In a management institute English teachers are not meant to be so much about language. They should groom the students, on how to get the point across, even how to walk in, etc.,” she adds. “She (it is usually a she) should be a role model of behaviour. The idea is not to burden the students, pressured by management study, with English,” she adds. “Global English is about communication,” says Sujata Sen, director, British Council, East India. British Council receives a flood of requests to start English teaching courses. She says that the very notion of “correct English” is debatable now. “English can mean one thing in literature classes and another in business communication,” she says.
The woman at the mall stops at the “Newborn” counter. She repeats: “Socks.” “Size?” asks the saleswoman. “One year,” the woman repeats. Out come two or three pairs. But she doesn’t like them. She points to the bottom of the pile. “That pair,” she says. The saleswoman doesn’t know what “pair” means. “Under?” she asks. Power to the masses A south Calcutta resident had prepared a feast for her New Year party: stuffed chicken breast, mashed potatoes and chocolate cheese cake, with recipes from the Internet. The stuffing required “goat cheese” and she didn’t know what it was. So she made do with paneer. “It was surely cow cheese?” she reasoned. “The middle classes are changing. The elite is changing,” says Sen. “Power has shifted into the hands of a much larger group,” she says — and this group is using English widely. If functional English is frankly a skill, the more “evolved” English now used by the “educated” middle classes, in their homes, on TV, on mobile phones, is also permeating all strata of society, without caring a hoot for the level of the speaker’s literacy. A Salt Lake resident was perturbed that her maid would exclaim “F***” and “S***”, expressions she had obviously picked up from her employers, quite freely, till the lady of the house explained their meaning. The maid stopped, shamefaced. But a barrier was broken. Global English is bringing down walls — of class, culture, ways of life. Sometimes it is just signage. In Dattabad, a low-income settlement on the fringe of Salt Lake, a birthday is being celebrated. A huge bright pandal has been put up, and at the entrance, almost drowned in balloons, is the ubiquitous, glittering thermocol board announcing “Happy Birthday”. The same party could have been going on anywhere in Salt Lake. The lady who threw the New Year bash informed that the children would have great fun with the “party crackers”. “Party crackers?” asked a guest. “Baaji, baaji,” said the hostess. These were once called phuljhuri and chorki.
The woman at the mall doesn’t like the socks. “Do you have caps?” “Yes ma’am, There,” a salesperson points at another shelf. But they are all stiff nylon hats. “But they are hats!” “Oh, this?” the salesperson asks, making a gesture of tying something under his chin. A little girl goes berserk. She wants a toy that her mother won’t give her. But all the child will say is: “Please mummy, please mummy, please mummy!” So who should feel threatened? Should anyone feel threatened? A minority, perhaps, of native English speakers and those in other countries with a colonial heritage who had invested heavily in the modern form of English — “those existing elites for whom English represents an identity marker, and many of those involved in the traditional English teaching business”, says Graddol. People — in Calcutta there are quite a few of them — who still squirm when they hear: “I recited two poetries”, or “The winter is very less”, or “I did my post-graduation in English”. Not that they can do much beyond squirming. Some of them feel obliged to use expressions that would have been previously incorrect, as using the correct expression (and a certain “posh” accent) sets them apart, makes them look snooty. A lady had a bad experience online. Fed up with nude pictures of women in the media, she posted a terse message on a blog, in impeccable English, calling for something for women too and ending with a sigh: “Anyway, only men require entertainment.” Whose line is it anyway? Perhaps “anyway” is not a familiar word any more, having been replaced by “anyways”. Anyway, many (men) were outraged. She was assaulted for having a “loose” character, and also for speaking in superior English. She was called “sickening” and “insane” and told that she wanted to “show the strength of ENGLISH” and flash her “nuisance fantasy”. The number of speakers of English will rise and rise, it is projected. “It is likely to reach a peak of around 2 billion in the next 10-15 years,” says Graddol, after which it may decline. Does modern English face an unmitigated tragedy then? What happens to “English literature” departments? Some feel that a lot of fuss is being made about nothing in the name of English coming to an end. Swapan Chakravorty, professor of English at Jadavpur University, says that such change is in the nature of all languages of power. It happened to Latin, to Greek — and now it is happening to English. “A language of power has its territoriality,” he says, pointing out that there would be a Yorkshire English as well as a Singapore English, which finds it perfectly legitimate to add “la” to a sentence. “But on one register this territoriality does not work,” says Chakravorty. Multiplicity was always a feature of English — a serious scientific discourse or a detailed analysis of the stock market performance — in English — would be as difficult to follow as a foreign language by many speakers of English. He also cites the example of phenomena such as phone sex. “The calls are made mostly from Surinam. Whatever the content is, that’s also English,” he says. At the same time, he adds, Amitav Ghosh in his latest book Sea of Poppies uses many Indian dialects, but hardly any is italicised. And English literature? The canon collapsed even in its native country a long time ago. As a former teacher of English at a university says: “English Literature started to look like Comparative Literature long ago.” The woman at the mall has not been able to buy anything. She is thirsty. She takes three flights up on escalators to reach the food court, but finds a long queue at the counter. She takes the three flights down, this time taking in the mall, feeling as if the stores are closing in on her. She also wants to speak in Bengali. At the ground level, she asks a mall attendant: “Khabar jol?” The attendant says: “Ekhane drinking water nei.” Is that global English, or global Bengali? | |||
| CHANDRIMA S. BHATTACHARYA |
