No space for a Bangladeshi English

English became Indian in the hands of Lord (Thomas Babington) Macaulay, who lived in India for about four years. He came to India on June 10, 1834 as a member of the supreme council when William Bentinck was governor general and he left for England to resume his writing career there in early 1838.

While he was in India, he accomplished a number of tasks related to political administration and justice two of which stand out as his towering contributions. The second of the tasks was the development of the Indian penal code and the first, which placed English above education in Sanskrit or Arabic, was his Minute on Education.

There was a debate going on at the time over which language should be used as the medium of instruction. The Orientalists favoured the classical languages, such as Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and the Anglicists favoured English. But none of the groups spoke against native tongues. All agreed that education should be imparted in native languages during the initial years of education.

The Minute on Education was dated February 2, 1835 and it received a seal of approval by Bentinck on March 7, 1835 which decided on the educational policy in British India.

Macaulay in his minute on education wrote: ‘… it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’

Lord Hastings, governor general of India, passed a resolution in October 1844 that all government appointments should have a preference to the people who know English.

It changed the Indian culture and promoted education of English in India. And English language became Indian, setting to roll on bilingualism of a sort, which, in course of time, gave birth to a variety of English, widely spoken by the Indians, known as Indian English in the same fashion as other varieties such as American, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, Hiberno-English, Hong Kong and others.

English of this sort has a grammar a bit different from the standard, different pronunciation with a different set of phonemes, different words and a bit different usage. Such a happening has also prompted the English language to make many words of Indian origin its own resources.

A major portion of such loan words are from Hindi, Sanskrit and Tamil. The Hindi words in English are bangle (an ornament worn by ladies in their hands), bindi (a decoration worn on the forehead by many women), bungalow (a single-storey house), cheetah, coolie, cummerbund (a waist band), dacoit, dinghy, ghee (purified Indian butter), gunny (a coarse heavy fabric made of jute or hemp), jungle, kedgeree, loot, pukka (genuine), sari, samosa, shampoo, thug, verandah and the like.

The Sanskrit words that have entered the English vocabulary include Aryan, avatar, guru, juggernaut (a large moving object), jute, mongoose, palanquin, pundit, yoga, etc. The Tamil words in English are cheroot, curry, ginger, mango, mullingatawny, pariah, rice, teak and others.

Other words of Indian origin in English are anaconda from Sinhalese, bandicoot from Telugu, coir from Malayalam, and the like.

But what the process brought about in India in relation to the language is a distinct variety of English that came to be spoken by the Indians, the people of the sub-continent for that matter, and especially by those not highly educated, as the language has continued to play the role of a lingua franca in a country where the constitution now recognises 18 languages as official — Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

English continues to remain diglossic of a sort — a social situation where the English tongue spoken by the less educated people is in a transitional shift in relation to the language spoken by the highly educated.

The Indian variety of the English language is featured by syntax, phonology and words of the native languages of the speakers. Most of the time, Hindi syntax surfaces in the English sentence constructions; Hindi words or English words with assumed Hindi connotations get into speech and the pronunciation and intonation become dependent on those of the local languages.

Standard English is valued most in the Indian sub-continent. This is chiefly British English, in spelling and grammar, spoken, in cases, with an Indianised British accent. Old grammar textbooks such as the ones by PC Wren and H Martin, and JC Nesfield continue to be taught in Indian high schools; and the higher grammar of the British English is considered the only correct system.

The Oxford University Press once published a dictionary of Indian English, with all its peculiarities; but the venture failed to attract the Indians as they continue to follow the proper British dictionaries.

The Indian or the sub-continental variety of English often employs progressive tense for the static verbs: ‘he is being stupid’, ‘she is knowing the answer’ or ‘he is having very much of property’. It uses prepositions at wrong places or wrong prepositions: ‘he is not paying attention on me’ and ‘they were discussing about the election’. It also drops prepositions at some places where they should be: ‘convey him my greetings’ and ‘I insisted immediate payment’. Indian English speakers often use wrong verbs: ‘I’ll take tea’ to mean ‘to have tea’; and ‘keep the book on the table’ to mean ‘to put’.

The Indians often use variations in noun number and determiners: ‘he has performed many charities’ or ‘she loves to pull my legs’. The constructions of tag questions are markedly different from the standard and are enough to drive a native English speaker up the wall: ‘we’re meeting tomorrow, isn’t it?’ and ‘he’s here, no?’

The word order is highly troublesome: ‘who you have come for?’ ‘they’re late always’, ‘my all friends are waiting.’ ‘You didn’t come on the bus?’ — an Indian English speaker would probably reply by saying, ‘yes, I didn’t’, leaving many an uninitiated English speaker at fault. There is an arbitrary use of articles — ‘a’ and ‘the’; and ‘a’ is often replaced with ‘one’: ‘we are going to temple’ and ‘one white lady’.

Intrusion of many Indian words is also noticed in the English language of the Indians. Use of ‘but’ or ‘only’ as intensifiers is commonplace: ‘I was just joking but’, ‘it was he only who read this book.’ The variety of English also uses Hindi ‘ki’ (that), or Bangla ‘maane’ (meaning) more frequently: ‘what I mean is ki I will go there’, and ‘what I meant to say maane this is not right’. Non-English suffixes such as ‘-baazi’, ‘-giri’ or ‘-wallah’ continue to be used, even in writing: ‘chandabaazi’, ‘cheating-giri’ or ‘taxi-wallah’.

Native-tongue idioms often get translated in the variety of English. A Hindi expression carryover, ‘what is you good name, please?’ (literal translation of ‘aapka shubh naam kya hai?’ — a polite way of asking for someone’s full name) is not rare to come by. Many words have changed their meaning: in the Indian variety, ‘deadly’ means ‘intense’, ‘high-tech’ means ‘stylish’ and ‘sexy’ means excellent. Expressions such as ‘the movie was deadly, yaar’, ‘your shoes are high-tech’, and ‘a sexy car’ are typical of Indian English.

Strangers, elders or anyone deserving respect are addressed by the name followed by the suffix ‘-ji’, ‘call a taxi for Kabir-ji’; other honorifc words such as ‘sahib’ and ‘begum’ for ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ are also used: ‘welcome, Taylor-sahib’, or ‘Begum Taylor would like this’.

Interjections and casual references of the native language often get in the spoken Indian English: ‘thik hai’, ‘arey, yaar, c’mon!’, ‘forget it, bhai’, and ‘ay, bhaiya, over here’.

The Indianised variety of English has a number of words typical of or originating in India. Such words are not generally well known outside South Asia. The Indians have coined words such as ‘batchmate’ or ‘batch-mate’ to mean the fellow students of the same session, but not of the same class. In India, ‘brinjal’ means ‘aubergine’; and ‘cousin-brother’ is the male first cousin and ‘cousin-sister’ is the female first cousin as opposed to ‘own brother or sister’. Harassment of women is known as ‘eve-teasing’; bridges meant for pedestrians are called ‘foot overbridges’; a warehouse is a ‘godown’, a grave mistake is a ‘Himalayan blunder’, eye-glasses are ‘opticals’, the opposite of postpone is ‘prepone’ and a fiancé or fiancée is a ‘would-be’. A chalk is ‘chalk-piece’ and dead silence is ‘pindrop silence’.

Uncount nouns are often used in the plural: litter becomes ‘litters’, furniture ‘furnitures’ and wood ‘woods’. Some words which should be used in the plural are often used in the singular: ‘one of my relative’. Shortened forms in the Indian English are a feature rather than a convenience: enthusiasm is ‘enthu’, also used as an adjective: ‘he is a real enthu guy’, or ‘he has a lot of enthu’. Fundamentals is often called ‘fundas’; ‘fundu’ is used to mean something or someone brilliant or wonderful: ‘he is a fundu person’ or ‘he is fundu.’ Principal becomes ‘prince’, supplementary ‘suppli’, superintendent, ‘soopi’ and laboratory assistant becomes ‘lab ass’ in the speech of students in colleges or schools.

Many Indian words in the variety, which are already plural, are further pluralised with an ending -s: ‘roti’ (bread) becomes ‘rotis’. The tongue at many places employs the ‘-fy’ suffix to make verbs from Indian words: Hindi word ‘muska’ results in ‘muskafy’ (to flatter somebody); ‘pataofy’ means ‘to woo someone’; other English suffixes used with Indian words are ‘-ic’ (Upanishadic, Tantric), ‘-dom’ (cooliedom), and ‘-ism’ (goondaism).

The Indianised British accent has developed certain phonological features which make the spoken form of the Indian variety stand far out others. English speech at all other places is more or less stress-timed; but the speech in the Indian variety has a fast tempo with choppy syllables — a syllabic rhythm, which makes comprehension difficult at times.

English alveolar plosives, the consonant sounds in the word ‘date’, are perceived by the Indians to be retroflex, pronounced with the tongue hitting against the palate far backward. And the sub-continental (inter)dental plosives, which are present in most Indian languages, replace the English dental fricatives in almost all the cases. The sound ‘r’ after vowel sounds, which was a fashion even in the 1920s in British English, is still retained by many in India. But younger educated people have been trying to avoid the sound in the context. Unstressed syllables of the standard English are often stressed in the Indian variety; suffixes receive stresses; and function words are not often reduced.

When the British left in 1947, English retained its status in India and Pakistan, mainly to serve the purpose of unity among the people speaking different languages. In 1971, Bangla was made the official language of Bangladesh and the medium of instruction. Although the number of living languages listed in the latest ‘Ethnologue: Languages of the Word’ for Bangladesh is 38, English lost its force as the medium of communications among the people. The features of the Indian variety of English continue to remain.

Bangladesh has Bangla as the predominant language, followed by Urdu which is mainly spoken by the stranded Pakistanis. And there are dozens of indigenous languages of small ethnic groups. English is used by the educated people with a varying degree of competence.

People even of the educated class in Bangladesh continue to use ‘hotel’ to mean restaurant. They say ‘bearer’ to mean waiter, and ‘cent per cent’ to mean a hundred per cent. The Bangladeshi speakers of English, in English or Bangla, very often use the word ‘affair’ to mean love affair: ‘he has an affair with her’. Saying something on the microphone has become miking, which many times also get in print. The word ‘miking’ means speaking on the PA system. In politics, ‘rallies’ are often processions the political parties bring out. Crackers are often referred to as ‘bombs’.

The word ‘protest’ has come to mean ‘protest against’. Wrong prepositions have also become a norm: ‘contribution in journalism’; in some cases, unnecessary prepositions are used: ‘they discussed about the matter’, or ‘he met with the minister’, which is probably due to the strong influence of the American version of the English language.

English in Bangladesh is also marked by the overuse of verbs in the past perfect tense. Although standard grammar says the tense can only be used in cases where a verb in the simple past is used to show the precedence of one act over the other, writers and speakers in Bangladesh continue to use the past perfect tense in an isolated context, just to mean that something has happened earlier. Similarly, the modal auxiliary ‘would’ often replaces ‘will’ even when the shift is not warranted. ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ are often used with a slightly deviant meaning, more in the sense of innocuous ‘friend’.

Many features of the Indian variety of English are contained in the yet-to-be-recognised-as-a-variety of Bangladeshi English, as the Indian version is a superset of what is spoken in Bangladesh.

Still English in Bangladesh has taken its own course — with some new peculiarities and characteristic features — probably because of political detachment. But such a version of English is considered incorrect in Bangladesh, which follows proper British dictionaries and the grammar of the native English speakers, as English remains no more a mode of communications for the common people.

And only because of this, a distinct variety of Bangladeshi English, in the fashion of the Indianised variety, will never come into existence. Some people will continue to use English in such a deviant form, and there will always be people who will brand the deviation as deviation from the standard.

Akkas, Abu Jar M. (2004 Nov. 9). No space for a Bangladeshi English. A Literary Journey, New Age Eid special. 25–27

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