For the Love of English1

The Charm and Hypnotic Power of English:

I never prided on my English. I’d no reason to. Unlike all our students, I never had the good fortune to study in an English Medium School till standard X. My parents were not rich by any stretch of imagination and as ours was a large family, they couldn’t afford to send me to a private school as education till date remains expensive and in most cases, beyond the means of the middle class families like ours. I studied in a mediocre school that happened to be the only boys’ school in our locality and dreaded English like nothing else. It was only after I got admitted at MAC (Maulana Azad College in Central Calcutta) that I realized the importance of the Language.

I’d write letters in English to my big brother, who was settled in Australia; talk to my sister-in-law in the language just to have the ‘feel’ of the language. Another thing I started doing at that time was to give tuition to students studying in the lower classes of some English Medium Schools. But even then I was not a natural, spontaneous communicator and my English left much to be desired. It was only after coming to Bhutan that I started expressing myself in the language. Here also I had no other options. I knew right from the start of my career that my whole future lay in learning English in the best way I could. When you set your heart to doing something passionately or desperately, circumstances, situations will come together conspiratorially to help you move on to your chosen path. My colleagues, students, even the locals would talk to me in English only. After two and a half decades of the near insanity of pursuing the language, today I feel much more comfortable in expressing myself in the language than at any other time of my life.

There is no denying the charm, easy grace or hypnotic power of English. Bengali, my native tongue, is known the world over for its beauty. But in the context of the 21^st century, no other language could provide you with the kind of freedom and opportunities as English does.  I learnt when I was a student pursuing Honours in English that in order to include a new word in French,  one needed the consent of the French Board or something and it is a painstakingly laborious process. For a new word to be accepted in French, it may take months, sometimes even years! Whereas English is the most accommodating of all languages. Everyday hundreds of words from other languages are finding their way into English language.  Once a very thriving language, Sanskrit, is dying a slow death due to all the restrictions it imposes on the user. English, on the other hand, is ever broadening, a living language of the highest order – the lingua franca of the world.

Long time back when the sun shone brighter and the winter felt like winter, I asked my late father, the Principal of a grade one college in Calcutta and a language teacher about his vocabulary. My father thought over the question for a minute or two before answering that most probably he had a vocabulary of some 10,000 words in English. Today in this rapidly developing world of all kinds of Science and technology, English language must have crossed the million figure mark.  And the number of words is increasing by the minute. English is happy borrowing words from all the languages of the world. That is not the only remarkable thing about the language. The interchange of Parts of Speech, that is, one word being used as different parts of speech, is taking English to dizzy heights.

In case I am being incomprehensible, let me try to make myself clearer. Some years back whenever I found my students using ‘suicide’ as a verb ( i.e., the man suicided as he found life unbearable), I tried to correct them on the spot by telling them that the word ‘suicide’ is a noun and cannot be used as a verb. If they wanted to use it, the correct way of doing it would be to say: He committed suicide. I really cannot tell if I could convince my students, but then I found a lot of pupils and people using other words like ‘on’, ‘off’, ‘problem’, 'apart' and many more as verbs! As in ‘May I on the lights, Sir?”, or ‘The last one to come out of the room, should off all the lights’. ‘He’s problemed us so much’, 'They have been aparted by her sudden change of job' and so on. Now I find myself in a dilemma and have a second thought before trying to correct them. “Up the ante” and such expressions have become a part of our life now. Who knows all the above stated words may be used as verbs in not so distant a future. Besides, once you get used to them, they do not sound all that bad. On the contrary, there is a sweetness and charm in these words being used as verbs!

The way English is thriving, especially with America simplifying the language like never before, it will be next to impossible for any language of the world to even throw a semblance of a challenge to English. Only Chinese is a close second, based on the number of people who use it worldwide. But then Chinese can never be as accommodating a language as ‘the Window of the World’. Can you imagine the native speakers of Chinese using words like ‘raja’, ‘papadaam’, or even ‘kadrinchela’ in their native language while communicating? The bottom line is irrespective of what the Japs or the Russo or the Koreans may have to say about the status of the language, English will rule the roost till there is no rooster left in the world!