·
Gnanaseelan,
J. (2001, February 17-18). English
Associations in Sri Lanka and Language Change. The Weekend Express,
English Associations in Sri Lanka and Language Change
Surprisingly, the English
language, which is a dole by the British during their colonial rule in Sri
Lanka, nowadays has been felt so earnestly with revived interest. The present
Sri Lanka seems to be the Oliver Twist with the begging bowl pathetically
craving ‘more’ for the English language, privatization, foreign investment, and
job opportunities from the West. Thus Sri Lanka in its multi-pronged forward
march for these three ‘thrills’ has lost some of its ‘dignities’ so say some of
the nation-conscious Srilankans struggling for self-sufficiency.
So in Sri Lanka too, first of
all, nobody but it was many English-educated upper class people with the
retrospection for golden colonial English felt that the best way to look after
a language is to place it in their care and patronization of English Associations.
Their initiation helped the country in a way that now we see English Associations
at national, provincial, district, divisional, school and university levels for
students, teachers, and English-educated working people in every nook and
corner of Sri Lanka. The recent appearance of the new caretakers, the
international schools are very sensitive and, why not, often sentimental in
protecting the English language from the influence of the ‘inferior’ indigenous
languages, Sinhala and Tamil.
One of the trends in
maintaining upper class or upper middle class status quo is founding an EA-an
immediate need if not founded so far! so that they can keep themselves away from
the intercourse of the working class people. They find relief by resorting to
these EAs like attending English Evening Tea Parties narrated in the Jane Austin’s
Victorian novels. It is expected as quite natural and perfect that, if an EA is
going to stage programs, of-course, one of the Shakespeare’s plays will be the
main event taken for granted like “curry” with rice in our Srilankan meals!
Most of the EAs in Srilanka labor
with all possible care and diligence to preserve and practice the English
language not as it is now but as it was! Now, under the careful theoretical
patronization of some of the Ph.D. holders in English, Prof. Thiru Kandaih,
Rajiva Wijayasinghe, Suresh Canagaraja, Arjuna Parakrama, and Dr. Manique
Gunasekare etc to quote some, the trend is slightly changing in Sri Lanka. Some
of the EAs are trying to develop a Srilankan English somewhere in-between the Shakespearean English and
Internet English.
The EAs have trained many
English teachers in such a way that when they try to break the British English license
to express their real feelings and thoughts in the genres of poems and stories
in the English language, they tremble with fear, yes such an inferiority
complex the EAs have developed in the minds of our Srilankan teachers and
students and other artists. It is so intense that their ‘natural’ inclination
is to stop writing further, as a result their creative moments and moods are
lost. They bring their half-baked cake to an ISA or an ADE in the Education
Department or to elderly people of the immediate post-colonial English skills
or to the university dons in English to be ploughed and fertilized! Does the
learning of the English language breed dependency and inferiority complex in
the minds of our children and adults? According to these teachers and students
of Y2K, the above-mentioned experts are the allowed judges of style and
language! Unfortunately these experts too used to brainwash them with their
hypercorrections and hypercriticism that nobody should have the impudence to
coin without their authority. No more derivations! No more constructions! If it
happens, “it would be as criminal then to coin words as money,” so says Daniel
Defoe, the famous English writer. Ironically speaking, even another 17th
century writer Jonathan Swift had accepted the extreme imperfection of the
English language and a need for improvements in a creative way! Indeed English
has achieved major improvements so far in all the other commonwealth countries
through its creative literature but in Sri Lanka? Our people are
whole-heartedly satisfied with the 15 and 16 Th century Shakespearean English!
In Sri Lanka it is so difficult
to persuade our people to accept change; let it be devolution package or
linguistic package, it makes no difference! The immediate response is
opposition especially from many of our EAs . For how long are they going to be
under this illusion and futility of language conservatism? Another foolhardy
effort of the Srilankan proponents of the EA conservatism is that no sooner
they see any creative piece with some discourse, semantic, syntactic, or
morphological innovations appropriate for the odor of the Srilankan soil than
they become either enraged or frightened. The consequent act is to seek the
help of the classic English writers of literature and grammar for defense or
offence: for the Srilankan ‘guruwarayas’ and ‘aasiriyars’ the encyclopedic
dictionary is the holy Bible! They never go astray from or don’t know how to go
astray from the Ten Commandments engraved there! The English lexicographer at
the Oxford University is the god they worship! to make it worse, even they
hesitate to use some Srilankan words which have been accepted and published in
the ODE! What is more dangerous is that these types of members in some EAs kill
the innovative minds of many Y2K generations! At this juncture, I would like to
remind that what I am proposing or defending is all within the mutual
intelligibility of the English dialects of linguistic diversity! The voice of
an indigenous nature or culture should be reflected in the programs of the EAs
in Sri Lanka. The members of the EAs must be enthusiastic in accommodating this
new perhaps joint venture: the East joins with the West!
Language change rarely gets
immediate approval in a context where large native populations speaking English
as a first language lives. But in countries like Sri Lanka, innovation can be
easily done with the popular linguistic features of the indigenous languages.
There are a limited number of the people using English as their first language;
they can’t resist the powerful linguistic literary innovations being made by
the masses that use English as their second language. Even the voice of the
conservative resistance would be heard only in a few EA meetings and in some
articles in the newspapers written by these people. So here also one thing is
important; yes, courage! To innovate, to break the language license even to
make mistakes in that effort, to resist the public notice and the criticisms of
a few writers with the colonial mind! Change doesn’t mean deterioration and decay
as often wailed and whiled away in the Srilankan political context.
Go and meet the retired or
senior clerks having worked or working in the government departments. They will
be wailing about the fallen standards of the speech of the young, forgetting
that the pattern of the language education have changed a great deal in the
post-independent or recent years. However, the British-accented ‘boys’ and
‘girls’, whose language training might have been somewhere abroad, have still
invaded The Srilankan State and the private broadcasting corporations. Even
these EAs of the international schools too are very careful in avoiding any
deviations from the traditional norms.
Please let us do away with this
unfounded pessimism towards change and indigenous innovations in English! The
English-educated elderly generations should drop off their misconceptions
regarding English of the Internet Era! Yes, Y2K young generation make many
English language errors! Let them do, why not? It may end up in an innovation!
Let there be a lot of Thomas
Alva Edisons of the English Language users in Sri Lanka! If you still crave for
the Queen’s Language, please don't crave for electricity and all that! It is a
war waged between the old usage of the British country and the new usage
particular to that region Sri Lanka-the survival of the fittest. I agree that there
should be a merger with the core of the English language common to all as an international
usage. Information technology yields new English –Internet English; the EAs of
Sri Lanka should be in touch with the times in which they evolve now. They
should not be sleeping and dreaming of their English Kings on the horses and
the English queens on their balconies!
Though these are problems of
unintelligibility, ambiguity, and social division, the IT would globalize the
good and neutralize the bad! Some degree of caution and concern is therefore
always desirable, in the interests of maintaining precise and efficient
communication globally; that doesn’t mean saying, ‘let us preserve the tongue
that Shakespeare spoke!
When our Srilankan societies
change, language change is also inevitable. The EAs should be heedful of this
reality. The Sinhala and Tamil kingdoms using Tamil and Sinhala adapted themselves
into the colonized English Empire using English as the governing language. After
the independence Lanka was governed by Srilankans using all three languages but
mainly the indigenous languages; so now again the Srilankan society has changed:
neo-colonialism, globalization, privatization-the words to name the present
change –so the English language again tries to become prominent in Sri Lanka! So
these changes are not rotative but spiral change with progress!
So don’t even think that the
English language of the colonial period is similar to the Internet English of
the contemporary era- a change with progress! We can communicate about the
information of the Shakespeare’s times by using the modern Internet English but
we can’t communicate the nature and the functions of the outcomes of the modern
inventions by using the Shakespearean English. Please cope with the new linguistic
forms that accompany each generation! No more emotional attacks against the
developments of the new words, meanings, pronunciations and grammatical constructions.
To conclude I can dare say that
here language change means progress; there may be a time when even our
indigenous languages die out due to their status changes in the coming decades
and centuries! the English language itself may undergo many drastic changes like
losing inflections and the established word order etc,.; after all whether we
like it or not, we have to accept the Darwin’s statement: the survival of the
fittest
ReplyDeleteThis is very important artical .Thank you