It feels a strange to write about such seemingly trivial matters at a time when horrific strife around the globe is being live-streamed to us all day. But writing itself is an escape. And today, I am going to escape by talking about my changing attitudes towards the English language in particular and to languages more generally. But before I get there, I must rant.
On “foreign” languages
The topic of this blog post that I has been stewing in my mind for years, in one form or another. The final push to put my thoughts into words was the recent news about changes to the UK’s immigration policy, with many people lauding the introduction of English tests for adults coming to the UK as dependents of foreign workers.
Let that sink in for a second. The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister is talking about foreigners needing to speak the primary language of the country they are immigrating to. The Prime Minister of a country that colonised half the world and imposed its language and its laws onto the inhabitants of far-away lands. The Prime Minister of a country whose citizens rarely speak even a few sentences of a second language, despite in many cases living in foreign, non-English-as-a-first-language countries for years upon years.
The audacity. Especially since the primary visa-holders from several countries where English is spoken as a primary language by many of the inhabitants (courtesy of those aforementioned… colonial “adventures”, shall we call them?) have to take expensive exams to prove they can speak this language in the first place before they can be given a visa. I myself took the IELTS test back in 2009 to come to the UK for my Master’s degree – and got a score of 8.5/9.0.
My result was hardly surprising given that my paternal grandmother, born in British-ruled India and educated in an English-medium school, spoke English fluently (along with several other languages), and that my parents (both fans of Jane Austen) spoke English to me almost exclusively from the time I turned three. As a nerdy child, my parents’ copy of a pocket edition of the OED was a treasured possession. My school principal punished any student caught speaking a language other than English in the corridors. I represented my school in elocution and debate competitions, in English. At university, I participated in Model United Nations, in English. For years, I wrote (very bad) poetry, in English.
English, to me, wasn’t a foreign language. It was my first tongue. It was the language of my waking thoughts and the language in which I communicated in my dreams. It still is. It isn’t my “mother tongue”1, but it might as well be.
Wren & Martin
The story of English spoken in India (or anywhere, for that matter) cannot be told without alluding to class and caste. But I am not equipped emotionally or intellectually to do that subject any justice, so I will stay clear, with the exception of acknowledging that my proficiency speaking English from an early age was the result and a reflection of privilege.
The story of English spoken in India also cannot be told without reference to Messrs Wren and Martin, authors of High School English Grammar and Composition, known eponymously as Wren & Martin. I am pretty sure my grandmother had a copy growing up. My parents certainly did, and I borrowed their copy on several occasions to look up some particular grammatical rule. Only when I moved to the UK and casually mentioned the book to some friends did I realise that it wasn’t a thing in this part of the world!
In school, we focused a lot on grammar when studying prose and poetry, including figures of speech. Most native speakers of English probably know of alliteration, hyperbole and onomatopœia. But what about synecdoche? What about linguistic constructions such as question tags? While sitting at a pub with some friends (all, as far as I am aware, native-born UK citizens), I asked if they knew what either of these were, and was met with blank stares.
Learning a language as a foreign language, even if you have used it as your primary language from a very young age, results in you learning a lot of the linguistic intricacies that a (monolingual) native speaker who learns the language primarily by use takes for granted and does not usually appreciate.
Beyond grammatical rules that we inherited and attempt to command, Indian English is full of delights, with their origins not exclusively limited to words (such as “dickie”/“dickey” for the boot of a car) and phrases that fell out of fashion in the UK. Look up the word “stepney” – used in India to refer a spare tyre – and its fascinating origins. Or click on all of the links on the Wikipedia page of English words of Indian origin to learn of our many verbal gifts to the language; I’m willing to bet more than a few will surprise you. And pay special attention to the usefulness of the word “prepone” – as the antonym of “postpone” as an alternative to “advance” – the first use of which isn’t Indian apparently, but which has been popularised in India.
English as She Is Spoke2
When I was ranting about the UK’s Prime Minister above, I intentionally chose not to talk about the amusement I encounter when I hear or read native-English-speakers in the UK massacre their own language; well, not so much the language so much as the “rules” as they are codified by the Powers That Be™. Of course I am aware that some of these are dialects (conjugating “to be” in the first person as “were”, for example), but there is no excuse for the proliferation of “could of” and friends.
Sometimes I wonder if my attitude would be different if the World Wide Web weren’t full of monolingual English speakers from Western countries punching down on Indians who speak English as a second or even a third language (and do so almost exclusively only in professional contexts). Mocking Indians for using phrases such as “doing the needful” and “revert back to you” is considered acceptable, but British expressions such as “I’m afraid” must be treated as idiomatic rather than referring to the speaker’s literal fear.
There are also some peculiarities of English as spoken by several groups of British people that simply grate. Take for example the inability to make a “th” sound in words such as “think”, with lots of people (particularly younger ones) pronouncing it “fink”. Just bite your tongue instead of your lower lip while speaking the word, for heaven’s sake. Or the bizarre insertion of an “r” sound in words such as “drawing” (pronounced “draw-ring”) and phrases such as “saw it” (“saw rit”). I have ranted so much about the latter to my friends, that I fear many of them are no longer my friends!
I would like to take this opportunity to draw attention to two expressions that amuse and annoy me in equal measure. The first is when people ask if you want “a tea” or “a coffee”. Objectively, this is incorrect grammar. Neither of those are countable! Surely you should ask for “some tea” or “a cup of coffee”. (A friend pointed out that the use of articles in this manner is also common in languages such as Italian, again in an idiomatic sense. But my point stands, from a pedantic perspective!)
The second phrase in question is employed when a British person wants you to do something for them, say pass the salt or send an e-mail. They don’t ask if you could do either; instead they ask you, “Do you want to [pass me the salt]/[send me that in an e-mail]?” It is a subtle way of not asking for things, by passing the onus of action onto the person being asked to do something. On more than one occasion, I have jokingly responded with, “No, I don’t have an inherent desire to do that, but I will do it for you since you seem to be asking.”
I should stress that my amusement comes not from a desire to mock people or be classist (as I said earlier, I am aware of the association between language and class/privilege) but from the frustration of thinking, “I had to demonstrate mastery of this language in order to study in your country, and you get away with daylight murder of your own mother tongue!”
I also feel the need to point out that I am absolutely in love with various British dialects, and try to incorporate them as much as I can in my daily speech (whether I am doing a terrible impression of the appropriate accent or not). My partner is from the East Midlands, so of course “Ay up me duck!” has become part of my daily vocabulary. And I thoroughly amused my friends last week when I said “Cheers drive!” in a somewhat-acceptable Bristolian accent when getting off the bus… in Aberdeen.
Gender and pronouns
On a deeply personal note, even before I started to transition and had to start telling people how I would like to be referred to (as a woman, no matter what the UK government has to say on the matter), one of things that irritated me about monolingual English speakers was their conflation of gender with (third-person) pronouns. Few phrases have irritated me as “What are your pronouns?” coming from a monolingual English speaker, when what they mean is “What is your gender?” Sure, gender and pronouns are encoded fairly directly in English, but that isn’t universally true across languages. And I speak half a dozen of them.
Take the sentence “I am doing [something],” in Hindi. The first-person conjugation of the verb “to do” is gendered – it would be different if the speaker were male or female. And the singular third-person pronoun, what English speakers are usually after when they ask you what your pronouns are, is gender-neutral. Indeed, all pronouns (first-, second- and third-person) in Hindi are gender-neutral. Again, gender is determined in the third-person (and the second-person) by verb conjugation. (Yes, the lack of standard non-binary linguistic gender when conjugating verbs is an issue, and one that people are exploring and playing with – sometimes using the gender-neutral first-person plural pronoun and verb conjugation, which is akin to the “royal we” in English – but hey, at least India legally recognises a third gender.)
Or take the sentence “I am tired,” in Spanish. For years I said “Estoy cansado.” Now suddenly I have to switch to “Estoy cansada.” Because, in addition to third-person pronouns, adjectives are also gendered in Latin (and several other) languages. Sure, people from Latin-language-majority countries also list their “pronouns” in e-mail signatures and on social-media profiles, but this is, I think, largely the subconscious acceptance of the English-speakers’ hegemony over social norms (and queerness?).
In practice, this particular rant is rather pointless given most of the contexts in which I get asked my “pronouns” involve the English language, and I get that it serves as a useful shorthand when people are trying to be considerate, but my word, it wouldn’t hurt you lot to learn another language or two!
My changing attitudes to languages
As you may have guessed, I am a pedant. In fact, I am a proud, badge-wearing pedant3. And a hypocrite. It used to drive my doctoral supervisor mad when I insisted on using (conventionally outdated) diæresis when writing words such as “coördination”. I finally agreed to get rid of them from the final version of my thesis.
I love to liberally sprinkle hyphens when encountering compound modifiers, which is another thing that annoys some English-speakers. Non-native speakers of this language, however, have told me that the act of tethering compound modifiers together helps them parse the sentences better. So I will stick with that! Wren and Martin’s book? I would call it “High-School English Grammar and Composition”.
I am also not a fan of compulsory serial commas (also known as Oxford commas). To me, they have a place when used appropriately. But I judge (mostly in my head) people who think their use is always necessary as narrow-minded and dogmatic.
However, the entire point of this blog post was to talk about my changing attitudes to these so-called rules, even though I have taken a meandering path to get here.
Languages evolve, I keep telling myself. And when someone objects to a “made-up word”, I retort – both pointlessly and unhelpfully – that all words are made up. I would like to think, however, that I, too, have evolved in my approach to language.
Not all of this evolution has been happy. Having trained as a journalist, dabbled as an academic and worked as a science writer, my writing has become less expressive and more forcefully structured – and extremely boring for the most part. Some of this is because I largely communicate with people who read and write English as a second or a third language, and some of it is because of the constraints of journalistic writing.
The good thing for me is that, over the years, I have become far less prescriptive about English as used by others. A big factor in this was my ex-wife, who is from Argentina. Argentinian (or Argentine, if you’d rather be correct than colloquial) Spanish differs from that spoken not just in Spain but in many parts of Latin America. Learning the language was a little frustrating initially, because the vocabulary of Rioplatense Spanish is so distinct. Whenever I grumbled about this, Juli would ask me, “Why should we use the same word that they use in Spain?” I had no good answer.
And so, I am learning to let go. I tell myself, “It doesn’t matter.” I limit my pedantry to enforcing writing style guides when I am in a position to do so; in my view, they’re designed not only for consistency but to aid comprehension.
And when people say, “A tea…”, I just add “cup of” in between the two words, in my head.
That honour goes to Kannada, the official language of the Indian state of Karnataka, where my family original hails from. Although, I suppose, technically, our mother tongue is Tulu, although I never learnt to speak it despite many in my family doing so.
This is a reference to a 19th book of the same name.
No, seriously, my partner got me a badge that says “PEDANT”.