I Told You So ki Our English is Bakwaas

During the heydays of Infosys Technologies, the company’s number cruncher and purveyor of quick wisdom, Mohandas Pai, often used to arrest audience attention with a pet statement of his. He would say something to the effect that, in fact, he believed that the British must be thanked for ruling India! At that point, he would make a mysterious pause as journalists went bonkers waiting for the Infosys spin of things. And then, Mr. Pai would declare that they gave us English with which we built the outsourcing business and made them dependent on us. But look at China, he would say with sympathy; they failed to learn English and missed the outsourcing bus. Now, that myth has been busted. China has ranked one notch higher than India in English proficiency in a worldwide study conducted by EF Education First, an English-teaching company. It wasn’t a small survey; it tested two million people across 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, none of whom has a significant high-tech coolie business. China ranked 29th, not bad for a country unblest with a colonial past, and India ranked 30th. The top ranker in Asia was Malaysia. Writing about this study, The Economist points to the ‘broad push’ the Chinese have given to English in recent years and predicts that India’s advantage may not last long.These findings are inconsistent with what we think of ourselves. We believe that we are an English superpower. In the business of globalization and economic growth, we think English will put us at an advantage. We even opened some call centres to prove the point. And we obsess with flaunting our children’s English knowledge at every social gathering. But what’s the point? Some obscure agency comes and says we are poor speakers of the language. Unfair, really. [caption id=“attachment_17864” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“We think of English-speaking children as smarter than those that don’t. Sherwin Crasto/Reuters”]  [/caption] Where did we go wrong? On many fronts, it turns out. We seem to nurture many myths about what makes for good English and how to go about learning it. Myth #1: English is knowledge. In no other aspect of our life does our slavish mindset carried over from the colonial past manifest itself like it does in our approach to English. We think of English-speaking children as smarter than those that don’t. We put people who bluster their way through with Pidgin English in the best jobs and let those with more substantive knowledge languish just because they speak in one of our own languages. In the process, we ignore a simple fact: eloquence is not a function of vocabulary but of content and logic. Given that a mere 4 percent of Indians speak English, this strategy restricts our ideas and leadership to a very small group. Listen here to an inspiring speech by an Indian activist who has a powerful expression despite his limited English. Our mainstream English media largely ignores him even though he is on TED. Myth #2: It is important to learn English, not the mother tongue. Slowly but steadily, the urban middle class is moving to speaking English at home. The idea is to make children learn the language at every conceivable opportunity. (Never mind that the parents often speak ungrammatical English and pass on their bad habits to the little ones.) Parents scrupulously avoid the mother tongue lest that may confuse the children and take away the English-learning edge they must imbibe. As a result, the new generations grow up without the benefit of the language they need to survive outside their cocoon. But that’s not the only damage from losing the mother tongue. Several studies have shown that an inadequate knowledge of the mother tongue hinders English-learning ability. A UNESCO study in 2005 pointed out that students with a sound knowledge of their mother tongue could transfer the literacy skills to a second language quite easily. But trying to do that in the reverse direction—learning a foreign language like English first and trying to transfer the skills back to the first language—was ‘highly inefficient and unnecessarily difficult’. Myth #3: Teaching kids early helps in learning English. Following a doctor’s advice, I did an experiment with both my children. I and my wife spoke to our daughters only in our mother tongue, Tamil, during the first three years of their lives. No adulteration. Later, we exposed them to English on TV and kid-friendly websites such as Boowa and Kwala. By the time they joined school, they were as good as, if not better than, any other kid. And they were superior in their mother tongue. Are you an anxious parent wanting to put your child on English yesterday? Just relax. Studies have shown that the later a child learns a second language the better is his or her absorption. Citing the EF study, The Economist says starting young, while it seems a good idea, may not pay off. “Children between eight and 12 learn foreign languages faster than younger ones; so each class hour on English is better spent on a 10-year-old than on a six-year-old.” Myth #4: English is the language of business. It was true when businesses were run by city-bred go-getters who catered to other city-bred go-getters. Today, more and more CEOs come from non-English backgrounds and so do their markets. Increasingly, sales and marketing functions are carried out in Hindi and the regional languages. The change is evident in the way the advertising industry is embracing the Indian languages. By the time our children grow up, English would be relegated to the clerical and accounting departments. Read this amusing story about how India Inc. already speaks, not in English, but that mish-mash called Hinglish. Anglophones are losing their snob value. Very soon, they might lose their outsourcing contracts to those schooled in their mother tongue. And Mohandas Pai would be long gone from Infosys.