English in India is not just a language but an asset more valuable than gold. It is a language that some Indians speak while the rest want to speak (excluding exceptions). The aspirational value of English is so inflated that the Tharoorian accent and vocabulary are not an exception but the desired norm. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to state that few English spelling errors or syntactical inaccuracies have the power to bring attributions like uneducated, incompetent, anti-intellectual or even philistine to a person who just knows another Indian language(s).
However, in academia, ascertaining the nature of English in India has often been contentious and, simultaneously, the identity of ‘Indian English’ has been emphatically challenged. There is a prominent chunk in Indian academia that even opposes the coinage of the term ‘Indian English’ as they believe that the influence of pan-Indian phonology over the articulation of English words and few indigenous morphological-lexical units cannot constitute a new variety of English on its own.
Moreover, many educated Indians consider ‘Indian English’ as a substandard or adulterated form of original English, or the appropriate term would be colonial English.
But the question remains, what do Indians speak when they claim to be speaking English? Braj Kachru, a prominent linguist, writes on this issue that the Indians mainly speak an ‘institutionalised second-language variety of English’. He gave the concept of three circles of English, namely inner, outer and expanding. The inner circle consists of native English speakers from the UK, USA or Australia. The outer circle consists of the former colonies of the UK, like several commonwealth nations that have retained English as their official language even after gaining independence.
English was initially imported to nations of the outer circle as a foreign language with limited usability but slowly it gained prominence and secured the position of the second language for the masses and official language for the government by replacing other indigenous second or official languages. The expanding circle represents countries that use English (to a certain extent) for trade and commerce, like China and Japan. According to Kachru, India falls under the outer circle and is trying hard to get into the inner circle.
Though the Official Languages Act of 1963, amended in 1967, gives the constitutional validity to use English as an associate official language of India, it is the institutionalised second-language variety of English that limits the range and scope of use of English for an ordinary Indian. Further, this institutionalised second-language variety comes to vernacular Indians as a foreign language.
One of the most prominent distinctions between a second and a foreign language is that a speaker could use his/her second language for any purpose that could otherwise be fulfilled by his/her mother tongue in the milieu s/he lives for a long time. The utility of a foreign language is highly domain-specific and can never substitute one’s mother tongue as the second language does.
Therefore, English in India is mostly used for administration, law, higher education, science and technology or other intellectual activities and not for buying vegetables in local markets, asking for directions in an unknown area, confabulating with friends or asking for more money from parents. The result is that the expansion of our vocabulary in English remains relatively in an infant state (for instance, we might know the highly technical jargon like prima facie or jurisprudence but we often fail to find the English equivalences for hing or kasuri methi; strange but true). Our syntactic abilities also suffer the desired accuracies as our exposure and opportunities to use English are extremely limited. This happens because Indians share functional nativeness with English and not genetic nativeness.
Genetic nativeness shows the historical relationship and coexistence of languages of a language family. Because of this kind of nativeness, these languages develop multiple shared linguistic properties that help to learn the other language more easily and effectively. For instance, the relationship shared between Indo-Aryan languages like Bhojpuri, Maithili, Bengali, Odia and Assamese is genetic. In this context, English in India cannot establish a cognate relationship with any of the Indian languages and, therefore, the acquisition of English becomes difficult and is relatively bound to be used for non-emotional, authoritative and highly technical purposes.
Moreover, linguistic errors are inevitable to occur both in written and oral forms even in one’s mother tongue. Therefore, committing errors while using English for different purposes is understandable and completely natural. The other day, instead of saying rarest of the rare, someone said rare of the rarest or caretaker as takecarer. In this context, India’s functional nativeness for English is still in its infancy and these ‘unpardonable’ mistakes keep occurring in the linguistic usages.
Now what is certain is that English is going to stay in India for a much longer period (for many it is ad infinitum) than what was anticipated in the initial years of the commencement of the constitution. Therefore, what is essential to understand is that the acquisition of English as a second or foreign language will be different from any Indian language(s). Moreover, the functionality in English will always have the influence of one’s mother tongue and the accuracy – lexical or grammatical – will be regularly challenged on the parameters of nativeness.
Krishna Kumar Pandey (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Central Institute of Hindi, Agra. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.