Decay of Indian languages

What price English Education?

English medium education is pricey: we all know that. But the price we pay in terms of the damage to, indeed decay of, our national languages is hardly ever realized.

My domestic help proudly tells me that her grandson goes to an English school. It is no wonder that she is happy about it: the elite in our society prefer education in English to mother tongue education. The trickle-down effect ensures that everyone aspires to English education.

English as a medium vs. English as a subject

It is alright to have English as a subject from class 1 and have good teachers imparting knowledge of English, while the medium of instruction is the mother tongue. That would ensure that children learn other subjects better as pointed out in the following section.

Linguistic genocide? Children's right to education in their own languages
[http://www.id21.org/insights/insights-ed05/art01.html]

Children learn better when they are taught through a language they know well.
Children in mother tongue-based bilingual programmes in the USA learn English more rapidly and do better academically than those in all-English programmes.
In the largest-ever study of minority education students who reached the highest levels of bilingualism and school achievement were those whose mother tongue was the main language of instruction for the longest period of time.

While it cannot be denied that knowledge of English is the vehicle to success in today’s India (and most parts of the world), it is also true that the medium of instruction need not be English for pupils to attain fluency in English. It can be taught in the English class room, by well-trained English teachers.

Poor quality of English taught in primary schools

Many ‘convented’ children pick up inaccurate grammar because of poor quality of English used by teachers at the primary level. Consider the salaries of primary school teachers and people in advertising or media: those really proficient in English tend to go to media or other lucrative jobs and only those who cannot make it elsewhere end up teaching. The poor quality of English they speak rubs off on to the pupils and we often hear convented grown-ups using expressions like: “I don’t think so it is true.”

I myself did not go to a convent and know that the right way to say it is “I don’t think it is true.”



While bad English use is one concern, given the level of proficiency of teachers, the other concern is what goes on with our own languages. In a recent television show in Hindi (Are you smarter than a 5th standard kid?), a major Hindi film maker was given three numbers in Hindi – 29, 37, 47 – and was asked to say which was the lowest. He tried counting and ended up at 20 and could not remember – from his school days – what was 21 and beyond. And he seemed quite proud of it; at least, pleased about it.

The worst part was, he seemed very pleased with his ignorance (though he was proud to show off his competence in French, which he picked up while in Switzerland). On a related note, when the song ‘ek do teen’ (from Tehzaab) was translated into Telugu, it became “one two three”. Of course the Telugu numbers do not fit into the tune of ‘ek do teen’ but the point is, they used English without much ado.

Moreover, it is becoming fashionable not to know one’s own mother tongue well enough. An example of this shocked me was when I was working on a project at the CIEFL (now called the EFLU). I was trying to find children who spoke English at home and study their acquisition patterns. In the course of that I met with a child’s parents and the father proudly said: “you speak to her in Telugu, she will answer in English”.

There are many people trying to bring up their children to learn English even at home and not give them a proper mother tongue. We will consider the evils of that in a later essay. For now, suffice it to say that it could lead to the death of our languages. Many languages are on the brink of extinction.

So what if some languages die out?

It leads to loss of information essential for survival.

Non-degraded ecosystems such as rainforests in the Amazon, Borneo or Papua New Guinea are often inhabited only by indigenous and traditional peoples. When their languages disappear, their knowledge about how to maintain diverse ecosystems sustainably also disappears, including important knowledge about human survival (for instance, about medicinal plants) that is encoded in their languages. By killing languages, we are ruining the prerequisites for human life on the planet.

Is it going to happen to Indian languages?

Language death may be a distant eventuality, but language decay is seen in our everyday life. When two educated Indians speak in their mother tongue, 30-40 percent of it tends to be English words. Just like the famous film director, we cannot find the right word in our own languages and fall back on a ‘convenient’ English word.

In this way, over time, a lot of our idioms and expressions can become obsolete like in the following example: The chipmunk (many people think it is a squirrel, but a squirrel does not have the three stripes) got the stripes – according to the Ramayana – when it was helping the building of the Ram Setu by dipping into the sea, rolling in the sand, and carrying the sand back into the Ram Setu. The dedication of the chipmunk is known as ‘udata bhakti’ in Telugu. Kids of 14 or 15 today don’t know that expression or don’t use it – because they are ‘soaked’ in English.

In the sequel to this essay, we will consider in greater detail what happens to our languages because of the fascination for English, and if there is an escape from this colonization of our minds.