Sunday, April 11, 2010

Are we an English-obsessed Nation?

The two largest English speaking countries in the world are India (350 million) and the United States (300 million).  In the next decade more than half of the English speaking population on Earth will be Indians. We will determine how the language will be spoken. Feels good, but I have a question – will Mamata Banerjee’s spoken words qualify as English too?  She could be speaking in Hindi, Bangla or English – to me it comes across as a strange, uniform version of Esperanto.

A recent survey has officially established the Queen’s language as India’s lingua franca. That comes as no surprise. We as a nation still suffer from a massive colonial hangover. In school we are essentially taught British. Mushrooming BPO s promote the Yankee version. Our children end up speaking a bastardized version. Texting has made it worse.  Address is now addy, afternoon afty, vacation vacays...kids are playing around with the language, which may not be such a bad thing.  Why waste time on silly things such as spellings and sentences?  It’s so not cool.

Full report here Desicritics

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