During one of my recent train journeys from my hometown to Bangalore city I happened to share my compartment with a young couple and their 3 year old child. In the course of the entire journey, the couple’s unfailing attempts to converse with their child in English were something worth noting.

Every time the child articulated a syllable or two or tried to communicate the parents very eagerly presented him with a list of options in “English” to choose from. The mother would say, “What do you want child, apple?”, “Are you hungry?”, and so on, to which the child replied back only with a flummoxed expression on his face.

This on – going exchange of words, syllabi, and expressions between the couple and their child had my mind ticking on a few questions- What was the reason behind the couples ‘never give up’ attempt to converse with their child in English ? Does conversing in English denote our social status, and does that mean that conversing in one’s own mother- tongue degrades the same? Is speaking English the need of the hour ? Are we preparing ourselves and our generations to communicate with the big world by just blindly trying to cram the ‘English language?’

The English language no doubt is the universal language of communication and is spoken in most of the parts of the world. It is remarkable to have a language that binds the entire world together. A common language for people around the world to share and express themselves and their ideas to each other. The language has helped in shrinking the world into a global village.

However in our endeavour to grasp the language and its nuances we have somewhere lost the very essence of language and the importance of it . Also we have sub-consciously created a hierarchy of languages in which we unmistakably give English the first preference amongst our mother tongue or any other regional language.

The problem here is not with the fact that the entire world is making a progress towards learning and communicating in a universal language. The problem here is how accurately are we grasping the aspects of that particular language. The English language has become the need of the hour especially in a country like ours. Indian parents stress on having their children inculcate education in “English” medium schools.

Children and youngsters these days make a constant effort to converse in English with their counter parts. Walk into a coffee shop or pass by a school in the afternoon hours and you will notice groups of youngsters conversing in what I would like to refer to as “The Teenage English”.

Today all of us have somehow or the other managed to learn the knack of conversing in ‘English’, but how many of us can actually claim to speak ‘the proper modern English.?’ An English without any colloquialism or any fancy strings attached? I doubt if even the native English speakers now can boast of conversing in the ‘proper modern English’

Am sure we have all come across people talking in a manner such as. “Dude, he was a stunner at the dance, man!” Am sure most of us would not find anything wrong in that sentence as it forms a part of our day to day conversation or shall we say our “modern lingo”. However if we had to rephrase the same sentence in the ‘proper modern English’, it would read something like this probably’ “He performed remarkably at the dance” or “He had the audience spell bound at the dance.” How many of us would actually express ourselves in that way???

Have we ever pondered over what makes us all adapt the ‘teenage English’ or drift away from the ‘proper modern English’? Is it our pursuit to be a part of the big happening crowd out there? Is it more casual and peppy to catch? Or is it just a matter of being ‘cool’?

Another issue that often bothers me is that, we in our pursuit to master the skill of English language have consciously or un-consciously degraded our regional languages. If you want to be a part of the big successful world, English is the prime criteria and if you don’t know the language of the day, sorry but you are not a part of the crowd. A person may be well versed in his or her own regional language and may probably be more educated than any of his or her English speaking counter parts, but if he or she doesn’t know English then all that education acquired is just a waste of time.

Why is it that we fail to include these people in the so called ‘educated’ and modern class of the society? Why do we look down upon these people? Does only speaking in English qualify us as educated and well-groomed? Are we ashamed of our Indian languages? Or do we feel that they cannot be at par with the universal language of the world?
We would have often heard people around us quoting “Shakespeare”, “Keats”, or “Wordsworth”, but how many people would you hear amongst us quoting “Tagore”, “Kalidasa”, or “Premchand”?

If language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes and the purpose in this case being, to reach out to the world via a common language ,but at the same time keeping our own intact. It is indeed important for all of us to know and learn English language as it is the universal language and to communicate with the world you need to know the language of the world. What is also important is to not let go of the treasures off your own language.

Most of the school children in our country academically score well in English language than in their second or third language, which would probably be their mother tongue or their national language. Ask any child to sing an English song and he would do the task making sure he get the perfect notes and the lyrics, but ask the same child to sing our National Anthem and we would have more than one slips of pronunciation and skips of lyrics. In fact wonder if most of us ever know what our National Anthem means or have we just been chanting it heedlessly?

Isn’t that a bit surprising, considering the fact that most of us communicate in ‘our language’ at our homes, then why do we find it so difficult to study the concepts of the same? Shouldn’t it be easier to grasp the concepts of something known than something new?

Reaching out and widening the horizon of our communicative world is a pivotal thing to do, but lets not try achieving it by shadowing the jewels of our own language. Let us not create and establish a hierarchy amongst languages of the world as we tend to do for many other things in life. Be not a chattel to one particular language but enjoy the diversity that we have.

Sakshi