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ВЕСТН. МОСК. УН-ТА. СЕР. 13. ВОСТОКОВЕДЕНИЕ. 2014. № 1
ФИЛОЛОГИЯ
L.V. Khokhlova
CHANGING CONTOURS OF MOTHER TONGUE-ENGLISH BILINGUALISM IN INDIA
The type of bilingualism and multilingualism of the urban intellectual elites in India is absolutely different from the bilingualism of the intellectual elite formed by previous generations. In spite of the permanent increase in the number of people identifying themselves as 'native speakers' of various Indian languages and in spite of the role of the official propaganda claiming to provide support to mother tongues and especially to Hindi, the role of mother tongues as tools of expressing intellectual demands of the speakers and of preserving cultural traditions of the society is rapidly decreasing. The symmetrical type of bilingualism of the 'parents' is gradually substituted by the recessive bilingualism of the younger generation.
Key words: mother tongue, types of bilingualism and multilingualism in India, code switching, code mixing, self identification, speech repertoire of Hindi speaking educated elite, language attitudes of urban elite, language movements.
Билингвизм и полилингвизм современной индийской элиты существенно отличается от билингвизма и полилингвизма интеллектуальной элиты предшествующих поколений. Так, например, билингвизм Рабиндраната Тагора и интеллектуалов его круга был продуктивным (productive), 'сбалансированным' (balanced) и 'смешанным' (compound). Они одинаково хорошо владели навыками порождения и восприятия текста на бенгали и английском и могли перевести любой текст с одного языка на другой. Было бы неверно утверждать, что в современной Южной Азии отсутствуют билингвы, обладающие такими же навыками, однако прогрессирует тенденция употребления родного и английского языка в дополнительной дистрибуции: родной язык употребляется для выражения конкретных понятий, английский — абстрактных.
Ключевые слова: родной язык, билингвизм и полилингвизм в Индии, переключение кодов, смешение кодов, самоидентификация, речевой репертуар хиндиязычной элиты.
I. The concept of 'mother tongue' as applied to Indian reality
The concept of 'mother tongue' is very complicated as applied to Indian reality. The 2001 Census of India defines 'mother tongue' as 'the language in which someone's mother was talking to a person in his/ her childhood'. In case the mother of the child had died, the enumerator should find out the language being spoken in the household. The census officials are supposed to record faithfully and correctly what the citizen says, even in case they disagree with him in identifying the language he
speaks. If the enumerator doubts that the details concerning a person's mother tongue are not reported honestly, he may later refer this matter to his Supervisor for further scrutiny1.
There are several situations when Census enumerators may not get correct answers concerning persons' mother tongues:
1) Uneducated people often use queer names for their mother tongue: caste names, names of clans, professions, religious sects, villages, regions or provinces, names of animals and birds etc. Indian linguists have studied many of such cases and have worked hard for classifying those queerly named languages and associating them with this or that of the four main language families of India: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric and Tibeto-Burman.
2) Both educated and uneducated people may have difficulties in naming their mother tongue if mother's native language plays very little role in their life. Many Indians who earn their livelihood outside their own linguistic province face the problem described by H.Y. Sharada Prasad in his column, 'All in All', in The Asian Age (March 7, 2001): his mother tongue was Kannada, his wife's — Telugu. The children were born in Delhi and spoke both Hindi and English at home as well as at school having no opportunity to study either of the parents' language. In case when a citizen hesitates to name his mother tongue the Census enumerator starts giving advices (though he is not supposed to enter into any dialogue with the respondent concerning the latter's choice). In case of Sharada Prasad's children the advice was that 'since they must be speaking Hindi, that language would be deemed to be their mother tongue'2.
In case of being associated with some organized movements, claiming recognition of the distinct identity for a particular language, the people may name their mother tongue on the basis of religious or political considerations. That happened in Punjab during Punjabi Suba movement when — without regard to linguistic reality — Sikhs responded to 1961 Census enumerators that their mother tongue was Punjabi and Hindus usually insisted that their mother tongue was Hindi. Another example is the state of Rajasthan during the movement claiming recognition of Rajasthani as an official language of the state. The term 'Rajasthani' itself was suggested by G. Grierson for several dialects that had common linguistic features. Later people started using it as a symbol of their identity. It was returned as the 'mother tongue' by 163 people in 1911, by 32 in 1921 — and by 367 726 in 1951. The latter amount got nearly doubled during the next 10 years — thus, in 1961 it reached 713 357. In 1961 'Rajasthani' speakers constituted only 3, 5% of the state population, but in 1971 they numbered
1 Mallikarjun B. Bilingualism and Census of India 2001: Mother tongue in Census 2001 // Language in India: Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow / M.S. Thirumalai (ed.).Vol. 1:3. May 2001. URL: http://www.languageinindia.com/april 2001 / indiancensus.html
2 Ibidem.
already 7,5%. In 2001 the speakers of Rajasthani constituted 32,5% of the whole population of Rajasthan (compare with 32 persons in 1921). That is a very interesting example of the transformation of the term that has been suggested by the English scholar (and, probably, used before him by some persons identifying themselves with the place name) and that later has become a symbol of self-identification for more than 18 million citizens of the state of Rajasthan.
II. Types of bilingualism in India
The linguistic situation in India provides a lot of data for research in all types of bilingualism known in sociolinguistic theory:
1) Productive vs. receptive bilingualism that can be divided into several subtypes, i.e. passive vs. active language skills in listening and reading comprehension, oral and written production. For example, Gujarati-Hindi bilingualism of educated people belongs to productive, of illiterate peasants — to the receptive type. Oral language skills used to prevail over written ones throughout Indian history. However, written skills used to be respected much more than oral ones. For an Indian being literate in any language usually implies oral fluency, rarely vise versa. In some cases people identify language with literacy and hence do not describe themselves as knowing a language unless they can read it; conversely, they may say that they know the language in case they can cope with its alphabet.
2) Recessive vs. ascendant bilingualism deals with the situations when the social functions of one language are decreasing or increasing, being shifted to the other language. For example, Punjabi-Urdu bilingualism in contemporary Indian state of Punjab belongs to recessive, Punjabi-English — to ascendant type.
3) Sequential bilingualism implies that a person becomes bilingual by learning first one language and then another; it is opposed to simultaneous bilingualism, under which both languages are learned simultaneously. The case of sequential bilingualism may be illustrated by the behavior of Rajasthani children who speak Marwari or Mewari at home and attend Hindi-medium school. Simultaneous bilingualism is represented by the children of the educated families residing in big cities (like Delhi, etc.) who pick up Hindi and English at home at the same time.
4) Vertical bilingualism (also known as diglossia) is typical for situations where in addition to the primary dialects of a certain language there exists a highly codified, superposed variety which is usually learned through formal education and is employed for the majority of written and spoken purposes but is not meant for ordinary conversation. Situations in Hindi speaking region and Tamilnadu usually illustrate this type of bilin-gualism. The term diglossia was first introduced by Ferguson3 to refer to
3 Ferguson C.A. Diglossia. Word 15, 1959: 325-340.
a relationship between varieties of the same language, but nowadays the term usually covers also relationships between different languages used in complementary distribution inside a certain society.
5) Balanced bilingualism refers to situations when fluency in both languages is equal — typical, e.g., is Punjabi-Hindi bilingualism of Punjabis residing in Delhi.
6) Coordinate and compound bilingualism: the compound bilingual supposedly has one semantic system and two codes; the coordinate bilingual supposedly has two semantic systems and two codes4. The first type presumes abilities to easily translate from one language into another, while second type bilinguals may have difficulties in translation. Opposition between coordinate and compound bilingualism in India needs more investigations to be carried out. An attempt will be undertaken below to demonstrate that Hindi-English bilingualism tends to compound type.
7) Semilingualism refers to persons who in comparison with mono-linguals have deficiencies in both languages. For example, students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi whose mother tongue is Bhojpuri may have deficiencies both in standard Hindi and in English.
Many Indian speakers are multilingual. P.B. Pandit has given an often quoted example of an Indian spice trader living in the suburbs of Bombay. His mother tongue and home language is a dialect of Gujarati; in the market he uses a variety of Marathi, the state language; at the railway station he speaks Hindustani—the pan-Indian lingua franca; the language of his spice trade is Kachi; in the evening he will watch a film in Hindi or in English and listen to a cricket-match commentary on the radio in English5.
All these forms of speech are in complementary distribution in the linguistic repertoire of the described businessman. Each code may contain not more than several hundred words (Hindi and English may contain more). Most probably the spice trader will not be able to talk about cricket-match or latest economic and political news in his mother tongue. If he does, all economic and political terms will be borrowed from English.
All types of bilingualism and multilingualism are interacting in India, patterns of language usage being determined by the social status of communicators, setting, domain, degree of intimacy, in/out small group contacts, nature of activity etc.
Census of India cannot register all cases of multilingualism. In the 2001 Census two types of language-related information were collected from the respondents:
4 Ervin S.M., Osgood C.E. Language Learning and Bilingualism // Psycholinguistics. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Supplement / Charles E. Osgood and F. Sebeok (eds).Vol. 49. 1954: 139-146; Weinreich U. Research Frontiers in Bilingualism Studies: Proceedings of the Eights International Congress of Linguists. Oslo, 1958: 786-787.
5 Pandit P.B. Perspectives on sociolinguistics in India // Language in Society / W.C. McCormac and S.A. Wurm (eds.). The Hague, Mouton, 1979: 172-173.
1. The name of the mother tongue;
2. The names of other languages known to the respondent.
Enumerators were to record up to two languages in order of proficiency, self-assessed by the respondent6.
The collected data actually says something about respondent's self-evaluation, but it may or may not reflect any linguistic reality. For example, people who know a few etiquette phrases in English may get it registered as their 'second language'.
III. Speech repertoire of educated urban elite in India:
Code switching and code-mixing in South Asia have been investigated by many scholars. (Bhatt, R. 19977; Dua, H. 19938; Gardner-Chloros, P., & Charles, R. 20 079; Gumperz, J. 196110; Gupta, R. 199111; Kachru, B. 197812; Kumar, A. 198613; Malik, L. 199414; Malhotra, S. 198015; Sahgal, A. 199416; Si Aung 201117; Singh, R. 199518; 199819 etc.). Speech reper-
6 Mallikarjun B. Language according to Census of India 2001 // Language in India: Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow / M.S. Thirumalai (ed.). Vol. 1: 2. April 2001. URL: http://www.languageinindia.com/april 2001 / indiancensus.html
7 Bhatt R. Code-switching, constraints, and optimal grammars // Lingua 102. 1997: 223-251.
8 Dua H. The national language and the ex-colonial language as rivals: The case of India // International Political Science Review 14. 1993: 293-308.
9Gardner-Chloros P. & Charles R. Subiko welcome (Welcomc to everyone): Hindi/ English code switching in the British-Asian media. Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics 2. 2007: 89-122.
10 Gumperz J. Speech variation and the study of Indian civilization // American Anthropologist 63, 1961: 976-988.
11 GuptaR. English and Indian languages: Code mixing // English in India: Issues and problems / R. Gupta & K. Kapoor (eds.). Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991: 207-215.
12 Kachru B. Code-mixing as a communicative strategy in India // International dimensions of bilingual education / J. Alatis (ed.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1978: 107-124.
13 Kumar A. Certain aspects of the form and functions of Hindi-English code-switching // Anthropological Linguistics 28. 1986: 195-205.
14 MalikL. Sociolinguistics: A study of code-switching. New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1994.
15 Malhotra S. Hindi-English code-switching and language choice in urban, upper-middle-class Indian families // Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics / P. Hamel and R. Schafer (eds.). 5. 1980: 39-46 (reprinted 1992).
16 Sahgal A. Patterns of language use in a bilingual setting in India // Second language acquisition: Socio-cultural and linguistic aspects of English in India / R. Agnihotri & A. Khanna (eds.). New Delhi; Sage, 1994: 299-306.
17 Si Aung. A diachronic investigation of Hindi-English code-switching, using Bollywood film scripts // International Journal of Bilingualism. Vol. 15, issue 4. December 2011: 388-407.
18 Singh R. Hindi-English code-mixing: Some implications for a general theory. Indian Linguistics 56, 1995: 95-105.
19 Singh R. Linguistic theory, language contact and modern Hindustani: The three sides of a linguistic story. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1998.
toire of South Asian citizens depends on many factors: age, place of birth, family background, education etc.
Here I shall try to observe some tendencies that are apparent in the changing speech repertoire of educated elite in big cities. Urban educated elite constitutes a very small part of the whole population, but its economic, political, educational role in the country is very important. In many respects it determines the future of the country. Other social groups are enviously copying its language behavior. Foreigners, who first of all contact that very group of population, usually have an impression that 'everybody in India speaks English', while not more than 5% of the whole Indian population have good command of English20.
The largest group of urban intellectual elite are Hindi speakers. They may be divided into many different groups on the basis of their skills in Hindi and English. In the broadest sense of the word, 'Hindi' refers to the dialect continuum that covers the 'Hindi belt' of Northern India. It includes the dialects of Rajasthan (Marwari, Mewari, Harauti, Mewati etc.), the dialects of Bihar (like Bhojpuri, Magahi, etc.) which are linguistically different from the standard Hindi. In its narrower sense the term 'Hindi' implies the dialects which are linguistically close to the literary standard, such as Braj, Awadhi, Bagheli, Chhattisgarhi, etc. In a still more narrow sense 'Hindi' signifies Khari boli or Kaurawi, the dialect that served as the basis for the literary standard. The native speakers of all these linguistic forms may claim that Hindi is their mother tongue.
This paper is based on the study of Hindi-English bilinguals whose mother tongue is the standard Hindi based on the Khari boli dialect and whose English knowledge is perfect. They constitute one of the most successful groups of Indian society. Unlike native speakers of small dialects who are often blamed for the communication impairment and are encouraged to abandon their dialect in favour of standard Hindi, the educated speakers of standard Hindi with a good command of English enjoy double privileges as their 'mother tongue' represents the official and the main link language of India and their second language, being formally an associate official language, in practice fulfils the functions of the main language in such spheres of activity as science, higher administration, education, business, judiciary, broadcasting, journalism, etc.
Bilinguals of this group inside their families usually learn two languages — Hindi and English — simultaneously since early childhood. As for professional life, the majority of the engineers, scientists, high level lawyers, educationists may be called in fact monolingual: in professional
20 According to data from the 2005 India Human Development Survey, surveyed households reported that among men 72 per cent do not speak English, 28% speak at least some English, and 5% are fluent. Among women, the corresponding proportions were 83%, 17%, and 3% percent. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
domain they cannot express themselves in their mother tongue as they get both general and professional education through English medium. The representatives of the Hindi speaking elite educated in English medium schools usually do not read books, magazines or newspapers in their mother tongue, but they often watch TV programs in Hindi and speak Hindi in all informal situations. This means that the mother tongue of those Hindi speakers exists in their speech repertoire predominantly in oral form.
The mother tongue of the Hindi elite is well presented in the popular film 'Tin pagal' ('Three idiots'), which describes the life of students of a very prestigious engineering college ICE. Below is an address speech in 'Hindi' pronounced by one of the professors when explaining to the college students the main principles of life:
koyal apna ghonsla cuckoo bird self's nest
ghonsle nest
ate hain come
dhakka push
kabhi nahin banati, vah
ever neg. builds it
men rakhti hai aur jab uske
in keeps and when its
to ve kya karte hain? ve
then they what do? Those
marke ghonsle se gira dete hain
strike (abs) nest from throw away
apne an de dusron ke
self's eggs others Gen
bacce is duniya men
children this world in
bacce children
dusre andon ko other eggs Acc
Competition over, the life begins with murder, that's nature — compete or die. You are also like
the koyal birds aur ye ve andejinko dhakkamarke tum log
cuckoo and these thoseeggs whompush strike (abs) you people
ICE men pahunce. Don't forget ki har sal ICE men car lakh in came that every year in four 100000
applications ate hain aur un se sirf do sau select hote hain.
come and them from only two hundred are usually selected
You! aur ye finished, broken eggs, mere bete ne tin sal and these my son Erg three years
apply kiya tha. Rejected every time. Remember, life is a race". did
'The cuckoo bird never makes nests. It keeps its eggs in other (birds') nests. And when its children come into this world, what do they do? They throw eggs of other birds out of the nest. Competition over, life begins with murder, that's nature — compete or die. You are also like cuckoo
birds and here are the eggs which you have thrown away in order to enter ICE. Do not forget that each year 400 000 applications arrive at ICE and out of applicants only two hundred people are selected. You! And here are finished, broken eggs (points at the applications of those who have been rejected lying on the ground). My son applied three times. Rejected each time. Remember, life is a race'.
The type of code switching in the professor's speech is typical for the Hindi-English bilingual elite. According to the accepted sociolinguistic theories, the phenomenon of code switching usually implies changing of at least one of the following parameters: the social status of communicators, the setting, the domain, the degree of intimacy, in/out small group contacts, the nature of activity, etc. But not a single of those parameters has been changed in the professor's speech, as his addressees belonged to the same group of bilingual students and the speech subject all the time remained the same.
However a remarkable tendency characterizes the ICE professor's language: Hindi is preferred for concrete matters, English — for abstract concepts. Thus, inside his mind English and Hindi seem to be kept on different conceptual shelves. It might be described as a special type of the compound bilingualism (one semantic system and two codes): the two codes have a complementary distribution in accordance not only with the communicators' status, their degree of intimacy or conversation topic ('weather talking' is in Hindi, while discussing physics — in English), butalsowith the conceptual network of the speaker (which,most probably, is in tune with that one of the listeners).
This type of language is in fact the elite speaker's mother tongue, i.e. the language a person hears and imitates at home since early childhood, the language in which he can fully express his personality, his intelligence, the language he can play with. Playing with English words prevails in his language repertoire — the dialogues in the film 'Three idiots' are a perfect sample of this 'native language' use by the gilded youth: about three dogs roaming in the yard:
yah Kilobite hai, yah Megabyte hai, aur yah ink! ma" this is this is and this their mother
Gigabyte hai.... yah bite nah!" kart!'
is it does not bite
'This is Kilobyte , this is Megabyte, and this is their mother Gigabyte. It does not bite!' about the mother of one of the students:
ma" skul se retired th! aur zyada tired raht! th! mother school from was and very remained
'Mother was retired from school and used to be very tired'
Very few Hindi idioms are used in elite's speech. Playing with the Hindi language serves the purpose of ridiculing the highbrow style of sanscritized Hindi which is a foreign language for the prosperous young Hindi-English bilinguals. This situation with sanscritized Hindi' may be defined as a 'receptive', not as a 'productive' bilingualism. The greatest amount of concepts, belonging to the domains of philosophy, politics, aesthetics etc. are expressed in English. In fact, the aesthetic lexicon typical for a speech of the majority of successful young people is constantly narrowing. The parents usually instruct their children saying: 'life is a race, compete or die'. In this competitive life there is no time left for reading fiction either in Hindi or in English: those, who 'waste time' on reading will be losers.
I interviewed fourty young men and women representing the younger generation in Delhi, Chandigarh and Hyderabad. The elders in those families were professors of History, English and Russian (specializing in literature or linguistics), but their children have chosen, as it often happens nowadays, the 'more in demand' professions like business, management, medicine, computer engineering and physics.
For the young people interviewed, English was the medium of instruction since early childhood, Hindi was learned by them at school as a compulsory subject, and at home they talked in Hindi, predominantly the professor's type of Hindi. I asked them to explain to me the content of five texts: two small pieces of poetry created by two pillars of the Chayavad21 trend in Hindi literature, namely, 'Ánsü' by Jay Shankar Prasad (1889-1937) and 'Tum aur main' by Süryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' (1896-1961); the third text was a ghazal by Mir Taki Mir (1723-1810), the 18th century poet who is considered to be one of the founders of modern Urdu poetry; the fourth was a political text on the problems of modern journalism taken from Internet and the fifth one — a song from the film 'Pyasa', produced and directed by Guru Dutt in 195722. The lyrics and music from 'Pyasa' have been extremely popular in India for a long time, so the aim of the test was to see if the young people could understand and enjoy the beauty of a song that had been loved by their parents.
Below is an average amount of unknown words in five texts: 34 words in 21 lines by Nirala, 22 words in 26 lines by Jay Shankar Prasad, 8 words in 12 lines by Mir Taki Mir, 22 words in 31 lines by Guru Dutt and 16 words on one standard page of political text.
It was not surprising that some parts of the poems of Prasad and Nirala proved to be the most incomprehensible for the young people I interviewed.
21 Chayavad — neo-romanticism in Hindi literature particularly Hindi poetry, usually dated 1917-1938.
22 This film marked the last collaboration of the long-lasted team of the composer S.D. Burman and of the lyricist Sahir Ludhianvl. In 2005, 'Pyasa' was rated as one of the 100 best films of all times by Time Magazine.
The Sanskrit words used by both authors hamper understanding of this type of poetry by a common Hindi speaker. The negative results of the sanskritization of Hindi that has made it 'nobody's language' have been discussed so many times that I shall not start repeating here the reasonable arguments of the opponents of this trend. Too much sanscritized Hindi was never liked by the majority of educated Hindi speakers, while words used in Urdu poetry, especially in songs, were rather familiar to all the representatives of elder generations. But the fact that these young people were unable to comprehend about 20 words in a small song created by Sahir Ludhianv! and belonging to the type of simplest lyrics shows that the vocabulary necessary for understanding India's cultural heritage has seriously narrowed.
The problem of presence or absence of the desire to understand the text is also very important. Thus, though the interviewed youngsters theoretically were aware of the fact that Prasad's or Nirala's poetry is the masterpiece of Hindi literature, I got an impression that general belief shared by all of them seemed to be that 'those masterpieces should be enjoyed only by specialists in Hindi literature'.
The general understanding of the meaning of the presented political text was more or less acceptable, though the unknown words (16 on one standard page) in it irritated the respondents, especially if the same unknown entity was being repeated again and again. The young people made a confession that they were out of the habit of regularly reading political texts in Hindi, though many of them happened to watch news in Hindi on TV.
According to my observations, the process of restricting the role of one's 'mother tongue' inside the speech repertoire of the younger elite, destined to form 'the future of the country', takes place not only in the Hindi speaking areas, but all over South Asia.
For example, many Bengali middle and upper-class parents send their children to Hindi or English medium schools with the idea that Hindi and English will be learned at school and Bengali will be picked up at home and in the street, so that their multilingual child will have more opportunities for getting a good job. The result is that the prestige of the language with an old literary tradition is going down. The persons belonging to previous generations were ashamed of spelling mistakes made when writing in their mother tongues, but their children are not at all bothered by such things. Similar language behaviour is typical for the elite all over South Asia, irrespective of the official status of its mother tongue — be it Punjabi in Pakistan — the language of the majority of population that does not have institutional support or Hindi in India, enjoying all the privileges of a national language.
The type of bilingualism and multilingualism of the modern South Asian elites is absolutely different from the bilingualism of the intellec-
tual elite formed by previous generations. For instance, the bilingualism of Rabindranath Tagor and of the people of his circle was productive, balanced and compound. — They had equal language skills in listening and in reading comprehension and also in oral and written producing of texts both in Bengali and in English, they were also able to translate any text from one language into another.
It will be wrong to say that in today's South Asia bilinguals of Tagor's type are completely absent, but the tendency towards a complementary distribution in usage: 'mother tongue' for concrete notions, English for expressing abstract concepts — is evidently progressing.
Even those speakers of Indian languages who like to listen to news and political commentaries in their mother tongue will abstain from discussing political, social or philosophical problems when the necessity to actively use Hindi terminology arises. For example, instead of Hindi 'mudra-sphiti' such speakers will use either English translation of this term 'inflation' or colloquial Hindi 'mahangai' (='expensiveness'), the word which implies a somewhat different meaning. Instead of 'nakaratmak pravrttiyan' they will use the English expression 'negative tendencies' or Hindi 'buraiyan' 'bad features' which is not at all a synonym for 'negative tendencies'. The speech etiquette does not allow the use of highbrow Hindi terms in colloquial Hindi or highbrow Persian or Arabic terms in the Punjabi language of Pakistan. In informal situations Punjabis of Pakistan would use the same 'mahangai' (='expensiveness') or English 'inflation' instead of the term borrowed from Arabic 'ifrat-e-zar'. There exists a kind of a 'patronizing' attitude towards the mother tongue as if toward a beloved but small baby who is unable to express serious theoretical concepts.
VI. Language attitudes of the Indian intellectual elite
The worst thing is that the educated strata of the society in nowadays India are not worried about the future of Indian languages. The speakers of Indian languages identify themselves with their linguistic communities, love their languages and feel quite optimistic about the future of their mother tongues. Annika Hohenthal23 who studied the standards of English in India has quoted the words of one of her Hindi speaking respondents 'This (English) is NOT my mother tongue. My mother tongue WILL dominate'. Being typical, this sample of sayings raises a number of questions:
1) Where and in what domains is a certain mother tongue supposed to 'dominate'? Can a language 'dominate', if the most educated, creative and prestigious group of its speakers use it only in everyday talk, when watching films and enjoying TV serials? Can a language 'dominate' if
23 Hohenthal A. English in India. Loyalty and Attitudes // Language in India. Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow / M. S. Thirumalai (ed.). Vol. 3:5. May 2003. URL: http://www.languageinindia.com/may2003/annika.html
the vocabulary of the young people in the domain of aesthetics is getting narrower and narrower with each next generation? Will it 'dominate' if the most educated part of the society is not acquainted with and is not taught to appreciate its own classical literature, if it does not want to read newspapers and magazines in its mother tongue and due to this is hardly able to discuss political and social problems in this language? Can a language 'dominate', if it is completely unused in science or is only partially used in research works having international quality in the domain of arts?
2) What kind of language will 'dominate'? That one which is symbolized by the ICE professor's language from the film 'Three idiots'?
3) Will a language ever 'dominate' if its speakers do not understand the necessity of its being normalized? — The great majority of Hindi speakers share the opinion of one of the respondents quoted by Annika Hohenthal: 'as long as you can get your message across effectively, it does not matter what version of language you use'.
In a situation when there is no authoritative board to impose certain standards on language usage or, at least, to explain to speakers the necessity of language normalization, most people start believing in unlimited variability. Mass media try to preserve literary standards, but these standards have no real prestige in society. People do not even notice cases of incorrect use of gender or of wrongly formed syntactic constructions.
The above formulated statements may of course raise a lot of objections:
1) The number of young people interviewed has been too small for acquiring any reliable statistical data.
This, no doubt, is correct, but my observations on the linguistic behaviour of Hindi-English bilingual elite youngsters that study at prestigious Universities, as well as the analysis of the language of the films like 'Three idiots' do show that large-scale surveys would hardly considerably change the already acquired picture.
2) Young people all over the world read less than their parents did and spend much more time on the Internet.
That is again generally correct, but can anyone imagine a young French doctor, engineer or linguist who would be unable to understand 20-30 words in one page of the masterpiece written by Charles Baudelaire or Guillaume Apollinaire? Or a young German scientist who would not be able to write a letter or would feel difficulties in reading a newspaper in German, his/her mother tongue?
3) The big cities and prestigious universities are not the whole of the country. The amount of Hindi/Hindustani speakers over the period of 1961 to 2001 has tripled, increasing from 134 million to 422 million. The state provides support to mother tongues, and specially to Hindi. There are many young people who study Prasad's or Nirala's works when taking their M.A. courses, who read only Hindi newspapers because their English is poor, etc.
This definitely happens, but the comparatively small group of the society that has been analyzed here is the most prestigious one in the country and its members solve all kinds of intellectual tasks, make careers in politics, represent India abroad and, what is most important, they determine the future of the country.
Having described attitude of Hindi speakers to their mother tongue, it is worth to touch upon their attitude to English. The main difference between English of Europe and that one of India lies in the fact that Europeans prefer to follow either Oxford or Northern American English standard. 'Russian English' or 'French English' will be ridiculed and can never become prestigious. The Indians have privatized English and created a new version of it considered prestigious by them. For example, the majority of Indian languages do not accept long words consisting of more than three syllables, that is why long English words are shortened to create commonly used terms like 'enthu' for 'enthusiasm'. One may say: "That guy has a lot of enthu." An illiterate person may be called 'a thumbs-up' because people like him use their thumbprint for signing documents. Unlike the North American or the Oxford English, the Indian English, especially the language of the young people, is fond of acronyms and abbreviations like, e.g., 'MCP' (= Male Chauvinist Pig); 'FOC' (= Free Of Charge), etc. People use them not only when writing, but also in oral speech. Time and place in the Indian English is usually emphasized by words that are translations of the Hindi emphatic particle 'h!': "I was in Delhi only" and "Can we meet today itself?"
The Indian English has been adjusted to the local etiquette system. For example, an Indian often asks: "What is your good name?", — which is a literal translation of Hindi 'apka shubh nam kya hai?'
Enumeration of all the properties of the Indian English goes beyond the scope of this paper. In general, they have already been described by various scholars (Baldridge 2002)24, (Kachru 1978)25, (Kachru 1983)26, 27(Trudgill & Hannah 1994)28 etc. A few samples of the Indian English were given above simply to demonstrate that Hindi-English bilinguals treat English as their second native language, and correspondingly they are sure that they have rights to change it according
24 Baldridge J. Linguistic and Social characteristics of Indian English // Language in India: Strength for today and Bright Hope for tomorrow / M.S. Thirumalai & B. Mallikar-jun (eds.). Vol. 2:4. June-July 2002. URL: http://www.languageinindia.com/junjul2002/ baldridgeindianenglish.html
25 Kachru B. Code-mixing as a communicative strategy in India // International dimensions of bilingual education / J. Alatis (ed.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1978: 107-124.
26 Kachru B. The Indianization of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
27 Kachru B. The Alchemy of English: The spread, functions and models of non-native Englishes. N. Y.: Pergamon Press, 1986.
28 Trudgill P. & Hannah Jean. International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English. L.: Edward Arnold, 1994.
to their tastes. The majority of the educated young people know well that 'enthu' is not a proper word in Standard English, but in their language it is a proper word, and they believe that their Indian English has as many rights to exist as, e.g., the North American variety.
Annika Hohenthal29 has been studying the attitudes of Indian bilin-guals to the Indian English. Remarkable is the statement of one of the respondents in support of deviations from the norm and variations in his English: "... it is natural that language develops. But it would be nice if there was a body to standardize it the world over (so that we don't have some people speaking one version and the others some other version). Again, pride, cultural influences and some other things make it impossible to force one version on others. My personal opinion is that, as long as you can get your message across effectively, it does not matter what version you use (I presume languages were developed for the sole purpose of communication and expression)".
It is not quite clear from this statement if the 'world body' is supposed to prescribe Americans and speakers of Oxford English to acquire a new English standard, perhaps including some features of the Indian English, but the two moments should be marked here, as they are very typical for the Indians' attitude: 1) the Indian English has no less rights to exist than the Oxford and the North American English; 2) the normalizing standards may be or may not be worked out, this is a matter of no importance.
Some respondents' opinion even was that the development of non-native varieties of English was very useful for Standard English itself: 'Non-native Englishes' are NOT deviant...They add richness to the original language, help it to grow, and are VERY NATURAL.,.'
There are many varieties of 'Non-native Englishes' circulating in India, influenced by speaker's mother tongue, education, social status etc. English of 'gilded youth' of big cities is one of them. It is a very powerful means of self-identification, symbol of high social status. It creates gaps between different social strata in all spheres, including academic domain.
The gap in academic domain will be increasing as the most brilliant students usually choose English as a medium of instruction. S.S. Deol (Deol 2006) made a detailed analysis of social background, language attitudes and motivation for choice of a language for the M.A. degree in English or Punjabi or Hindi. The respondents comprised 253 post graduate students doing M.A. in English/Punjabi/Hindi at the departments of English, Punjabi and Hindi at the Punjab University of Chandigarh, Punjabi University of Patiala and Guru Nanak Dev University of Amritsar. Among those who chose English as the medium of instruction 85,1% respondents belonged to urban population, 14,9% — to rural. The children of the educated parents, the students from the high income families, etc. usually preferred English, not Punjabi or Hindi, as the medium of instruction.
29 Hohenthal A. Op. cit.
The academic research work in humanities is being fulfilled in different languages, but its standards are different. Partially true is the fact that research works in humanities written in Indian languages are of lower standards than those in English. For example, linguistics in Hindi is based upon the traditional terminology which has been coined by Panini and his followers. Terms like, e.g., 'Minimalist program', 'Functional grammar', 'telicity', 'anti-passive', etc. are naturally absent in it. Attempts to publish up-to-date linguistic works in Hindi have been undertaken by very few authors who usually write in English. They use Sanskrit terms that have never existed in Panini's grammar and supply in brackets their English equivalents — like, e.g., 'dhvaniki' (phonetics), 'dhvanimi' (phonemics), etc. The majority of linguists who write in a traditional manner are absolutely unaware of modern linguistic theories. Similar processes seem to take place also in other fields of humanities.
Concluding remarks
A lot of similarities with Hindi-English bilinguals' behavior may be found in linguistic behavior of Punjabi-English, Gujarati-English, Bengali-English and of other types of bilinguals in India. This situation is not unique. For instance, the Russian aristocracy in the 18th — the first half of the 19th centuries was using similar type of language mixture — this time of Russian and French; only later there appeared social forces able to overcome this situation.
In almost each European country the rising bourgeoisie first of all made efforts to standardize and promote its mother tongue, to convert it into the main means of communication at all levels and through this to facilitate functioning of their language as the important tool of national formation. The modern epoch of globalization has created new tendency in the processes of national development: ethnic groups usually start language movements when they feel economically and/or politically and/or culturally depressed and hope to gain some privileges deemed to become the successful results of those movements. Very often the main impulse of linguistic movements is the desire of the 'sons of the soil' to have more job opportunities in comparison with the migrants. Good examples of such movements are the movement for the official recognition of Rajasthani in Rajasthan, the recently obtained official status of Dogri in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and of Maithili in Bihar. Local educated elite actively participate in language movements, but it does not mean that in case of official recognition social functions of Dogri, Rajasthani or Maithili will increase tremendously or active participants of language movements would like to educate their children in their mother tongue.
If the 'sons of the soil' are not interested in improving their economic, political or social status, linguistic movements do not take place. Language
attitudes of Hindi speaking elite in India or Punjabi speakers in Pakistan may serve as a good example of this.
Self-identification on linguistic basis does not mean that the intellectual elite of the society is interested in developing its mother tongue, in reading, writing, educating in this language their children, etc. The fact that the mother tongue plays an insignificant role in their speech repertoire does not bother the most influential members of the Indian society.
In spite of the permanent increase in the number of people identifying themselves as 'native speakers' of various Indian languages and in spite of the role of the official propaganda claiming to provide support to mother tongues and especially to Hindi, the role of mother tongues as tools of expressing intellectual demands of the speakers and of preserving cultural traditions of the society is rapidly decreasing.
The symmetrical type of bilingualism of the 'parents', who were able to express themselves both in their 'mother tongues' and in English not only in the field of 'weather talking' but also in cultural domains, is gradually substituted by the recessive bilingualism of the younger generation when the mother tongue is used predominantly in everyday life and when the speakers' active vocabulary remains restricted to some 1500 words, connected mostly with concrete notions, while the intellectual concepts are expressed mainly in English.
Culture in general is the domain of human life that is most endangered by the development of this new type of reality that finds expression in a new type of 'mother tongue', the mixed Hindi-English code.
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Сведения об авторе: Хохлова Людмила Викторовна, канд. филол. наук,
доцент кафедры индийской филологии ИСАА МГУ имени М.В. Ломоносова.
E-mail: [email protected]
