Linguistic Insanity

As I’ve promised my friend Dave from school (not the Brit) that I would contribute to his linguistic blog, I’ve decided to reflect on what communication in India has been like in my month here. I got a kick out of impressing my Indian friends the first few days I was here, by seemingly understanding the conversations that emanate from the code-switching grab-bag that is the centerpiece of most communication in India. They would speak to each other in a mix of Tamil, which is the state language of Tamil Nadu where they are all working on their Masters; Hindi, which can vaguely be considered a National language but which loses all currency in the southern states; English which is often preferred to Hindi and is a sign of education especially when riding the trains; Telugu, which is spoken by many people in the state north of Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh. Then you have Malayalam, spoken by my friend Maria from Kerala, and a personal favorite of mine just by virtue of being a palindrome; and Kanata, spoken by my friend Deepa from Karnataka. I’ve only scratched the surface of the 2 official national languages, 14 or so official state languages (Tamil Nadu for instance recognizes Tamil as its official language but not Hindi or English) and around 152 recognized languages in India (don’t quote me on those figures as that is what I’ve gotten through asking people but have not had the opportunity to verify). Through a mix of watching facial features, body language, picking up the occasional English word, and recognizing context clues, I was able to understand a portion of what they were saying and would chime in occasionally and strategically, eliciting disbelief. However, they shouldn’t be too impressed as the linguistic gymnastics they perform everyday is unlike anything seen in the Western world and makes my fluency in five related languages quite unimpressive.

I had spent the last 6 months preparing for the largest exam of my life, my PhD qualifying exams in Romance Linguistics, before coming to India. A large portion of the exam was looking at language standardization in Spanish and French speaking countries. While most of Europe has been moving towards a one nation one language model that has been slowly snuffing out regional languages and silencing any protests from migrant languages, places in Africa and Asia have a long tradition of the coexistence of several languages. Interlocutors are expected to participate in this push and pull, give and take model of communication. When we went to Andra Pradesh for the wedding, I hadn’t realized at first that most of my friends did not speak the same language as the autorickshaw drivers or other people we communicated with on the streets. They were relying on common words, gestures, and brief forays into the supposed national languages to get their points across. This is the first country in 35 where I’ve been at a loss of words. The first thing I try to do when visiting any country is learn a few words in the dominant language, both as a sign of respect to the people I want to engage and as a survival method. Assuming that the rest of the world speaks English when traveling in the ways I prefer to, away from the beaten path, far from urban centers, is suicide as English is often not an option. However, in India, especially in the South, learning Hindi is not going to give you much leverage and learning enough of the state languages to be vaguely effective takes time. Having started my India travels in Tamil Nadu also heavily influenced my conception of what it means to speak a language in India. Tamil Nadu was the only state not to ratify Hindi as a national language that would be taught in schools. English is learned before Hindi and in the small enclave of Pondicherry, that is surrounded by Tamil Nadu and was once a French colony, French is taught in schools before Hindi. I’m sure my take on Hindi will change once I travel around the North, but for now, Hindi has been absent from my travels.

The other language that is relevant to my personal research is Portuguese, which is still spoken in parts of Goa. I was amazed at the Portuguese flavor that I breathed in when visiting Panjim (aka Panaji) and Old Goa. The churches, the streets, everything reminded me slightly of Lisbon. In fact, Old Goa had been bigger than Lisbon in its heyday. I was fortunate to stay in the guesthouse of a very sweet family that still spoke Portuguese. When I told them about my PhD work in Romance Languages, they were very excited to talk about the situation in Goa. Portuguese occupies a precarious position in Goa. You won’t hear it at all when visiting the beaches but it will subtly make its way into your consciousness in the small towns and especially in the capital city of Panjim. I met the grandmother of my guesthouse who mainly spoke Portuguese and had a nice conversation with her. The owner and his wife also spoke Portuguese, and the children were learning it in school. Oddly enough, until recently, most children learned French as a foreign language in schools although there was no history of French presence in the Western part of India. Portuguese has been making a comeback as a heritage language since it had begun to fall on death ears for the younger generations. Who knows what will come of Portuguese as it is just one more language in a melting pot of regional languages. Much will depend on the linguistic policies instated by Goa and the pride that one feels when speaking Portuguese.

The other fascinating thing I find about India is how English is used. In any place where language contact exists, you will have innovative ways of expressing a language. Most Indians are conscious of the way they speak English and feel that their version is not adequate because is diverges from the standards set forth by nations like the US and England. This is seen most notably in the English courses that profess the ability to rid a speaker of his Indian accent or eliminate Indian English colloquialisms. As consumers in the US and elsewhere complain about outsourcing and insist on speaking to someone local, many businesses have given their employees western sounding names and reward them with incentives the more Western they sound. Questions of where Indian English fits on the native speaker hierarchy that deems certain forms of English acceptable while others are seen as deviant are complicated by the fact that many Indians are native speakers of English, speak English in the home, see English as their native tongue, even if they speak other languages just as fluently. Places like the US and England follow monolingual norms and extol the virtues of monolingualism, but this is far from the reality in India, and should not be the model imposed on them or on the large number of plurilingual countries in the world.

One of the reasons the makes India special, especially for a linguist like me, is that the English spoken here differs to that which I grew up with or that which I’ve heard in the UK. Some differences are semantic in form. Words have slightly changed meaning to be used in different contexts. No one says, “Are you there yet?” “When will you get there/when will you arrive”. The proper form is “have you reached”, explained to me as a borrowing from Hindi. This was very similar to how in Senegal when the standard way of saying, when do you get off work is “A quelle heure descends-tu du travail?” which literally means “What time do you descend/get down from work?” taken directly from Wolof. Some innovations from standard western English are syntactic. Words like “pain” retain its status as a noun but is preferably a verb. When I got my nose pierced, my entourage (as everyone insisted on being there for my Indianfication, as some of them liked to call it) kept asking me, “does it pain you?” and later “is it still paining you?”. Some differences are lexical. The denominations are baffling to me. Everyone counts in laks. 1 lak=100,000. 1 crore is 100,000 laks. At least I think that’s how it works although I’m quite possibly just making that conversion up because I can’t remember. Too confusing for me. I like to stick with millions and billions. But obviously, this society felt a need for these other measurements. The list goes on and on prompting me to want to scour the country, collecting English phrases that differ from my norm. However, this could just be another ploy for me to stay in the country longer and perhaps one day receive grant money for my many linguistic inquisitions.