Tamil: Risks of Creolization

One of the recurrent themes in the mails exchanged in mail groups like that led ably by MaGo relates to the unnecessary or excessive infusion of English words into spoken / written Tamil. The recent Pradhana Vizha, unfortunately, has turned out to be yet another glaring public display of this trend. It is, therefore, gratifying to note that the event has moved several members of the mail group (MaGo's GlobalTamils) to express their objection, if not outrage.

It is sad that the less desirable of the language habits of India / Tamil Nadu are taking deeper roots in Singapore as well. At a time when our government is seeking to educate Singaporeans about the virtues of Good English (a national campaign has been launched by PM LHL), we are witnessing more instances of deterioration in the public use of Tamil language. This aping of the language styles of Tamil Nadu is clearly traceable to the influences of Tamil cinema, cable TV channels, some popular Tamil magazines, and the advertisement industry. What is happening (or, allowed to happen) to Tamil is not something unique or limited to Tamil, amongst Indian languages. Hindi is clearly the trend-setter, thanks to Bollywood and satellite / cable TV.

In fact, way back in December 1993, a leading Indian columnist Vir Sanghvi hailed Hinglish (Hindi + English) as a "new Indian language" that was emerging. He wrote as follows:

QUOTE
Nearly everything that seeks to appeal to a mass urban audience is in Hinglish..... And nearly everybody who is interviewed on television these days will opt for a cocktail that is largely Hinglish. Often, the links will be in Hindi but the vocabulary – particularly when the words are not drawn from everyday usage – will be English. Thus, parliamentary session, bank scam, minority government, Assembly elections, terrorism and Cabinet reshuffle will rarely, if ever, be translated into Hindi.

If you want to hear the Hindi equivalents of these terms, then you’ll have to wait for Doordarshan’s national news bulletins in which glassy-eyed news readers twist their tongues around Sanskrit derivatives, whose pedigree dates back only to the founding of All India Radio.

But though AIR and DD have done their best to foist this Sanskritised Hindi on a confused public for so many years, the truth is that people have rejected this artificial language. Instead, a new vernacular that mirrors the cross-cultural experiences of urban Indians has evolved: Hinglish.

To be fair, the origins of Hinglish predate the Metro channel and Zee TV. An early exponent of this new language was the late Rajiv Gandhi, who was probably the first Prime Minister in Indian history to say things like, “Hum is problem ko solve karenge.”

And Bombay’s admen have done their bit to evolve Hinglish. It was Sylvie daCunha and Bharat Dhabolkar of daCunha Associates who merged Hindi and English in the Amul Butter hoardings in the 1980s……

Should we be pleased by the remarkable success of Hinglish? Or should we resent the fact that a bastardized language is becoming the link between India’s many disparate cultures? On balance we should be pleased. The sad reality is that Hindi never took off as a link language because many Indians didn’t think very much of it or of its literature and culture. Even today, the average Bengali or Gujarati or Malayali regards Hindi as being a second-rate language with a sub-standard literature.

Bengalis believe that their culture and literature are far superior to those of the cow belt…… No doubt the same is true of Malayalis, Tamils and many others who resent the fact that the language of the cultural wasteland of the cow belt has become India’s national language.

Nor does it help that governmental Hindi tends to be absurdly Sanskritised or that nobody actually speaks in the manner of AIR news-readers. Where Hindi does survive, it is in a more rough and ready form: as Hindustani with a heavy Urdu influence or even as Bombay Hindi, which draws from Gujarati and Marathi.

Hinglish is a modern counterpart of Hindustani or Bombay Hindi. But while those languages drew from other Indian tongues, the significance of Hinglish lies in its cannibalizing of English for much of its vocabulary……….

Hinglish may well be the bastard child of Hindustani and Indian English but at least it is a language that we understand and that we can call our own.
UNQUOTE

I would strongly urge all of you to read very closely the above words of one of India’s leading columnists. Any one who is interested in preserving India’s collective linguistic heritage, perhaps the richest in the world, must also be alarmed by the folly of other Indian languages, e.g. Tamil, mindlessly following the path of Hindi towards creolization through the indiscriminate importation of English words.

The question we should ask ourselves is this:

“Should we allow what has happened to Hindi to happen to Tamil, a first-rate language (and, of course, a classical language) with more than two thousand years of literature and culture?”

This is a question not only for organizers and participants of future public entertainment shows, but also for all those who are tracking the deliberations connected with the proposed reform of the teaching of Tamil language in Singapore schools. Of course, it is also a question for all of the rest of the Tamil-speaking world.


Comments may be forwarded to: anbarul@yahoo.com