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erosion of language skills in India is a major problem
that requires serious and urgent policy attention.
It has happened slowly, almost
unbeknownst to most of us. But the change has been widespread
and reasonably dramatic. In a country where written
language skills may have been the preserve of minority
but were still valued and cherished by that minority,
we now have the emergence of a new generation where
these skills are noticeably absent.
Across the country, institutions of higher education
(even the most elite among them) are producing graduates
with less than perfect control over the language or
languages they normally use. The problem is particularly
marked in English, where it is now difficult to find
educated people under 40 years of age who do not regularly
make mistakes in spelling, grammar and syntax. It is
now commonplace to come across incorrect English in
newspapers, in government documents, in advertisements,
in instruction manuals - in fact, in everything that
is written.
All this could still be excused in the case of English,
on the grounds that despite its wide prevalence, it
is not the mother tongue. But unfortunately, the same
seems to be true of the actual mother tongues. Those
who teach in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, etc., increasingly
complain of the lack of command of their students over
basic language skills, especially in written form. So
we now have as products of our education system, people
who do not have true command over any language.
How has this happened? Even twenty years ago, schools
and colleges in India were producing students whose
English capabilities were on par with any native speaker,
even if there were local peculiarities of usage. Indeed,
among the elite, language skills were very highly developed.
In an even earlier generation, being genuinely multilingual
was almost a necessary qualification. Being educated
inevitably meant also that proficiency not only in English,
but in one's native tongue, and familiarity with its
literature, were seen as essential.
While this may not have been so true for those born
into the post-Independence elite, it was still the case
that ''English medium education'' ensured that the correct
use of the language was inculcated and generally absorbed,
and also that the vocabulary was at least moderately
large and reasonably sophisticated. Such an assurance
can no longer be made for the vast majority of more
recent products of our education system, even when they
have graduated from the most prestigious and internationally
recognised institutions.
This actually reflects different trends, not only in
education, but also in society in general, in modes
of social communication and information sharing, and
even in the social and material rewards for correct
use of language.
The problems may begin from early school education onwards,
because of a newer and more ''flexible'' approach to pedagogy,
whereby insistence of what are seen as ''rigid rules''
(of spelling, grammar, and so on) was abandoned. This
was a tendency that first became evident in the United
States in the 1970s, and moved on to England by the
early 1980s. Naturally, it was adopted by the 1990s
in India on the assumption that if it was being done
there, it must be the best way of doing things here
as well.
In the primary and middle school curriculum of private
schools in India, for example, there is hardly any emphasis
on the rules of grammar, which are introduced in such
a gentle and hesitant fashion that they could easily
be ignored by less punctilious students. Spelling mistakes
are routinely condoned and there seem to be few incentives
to ensure that correct spelling is embedded in the mind.
(So much so that there are even examples of spelling
mistakes made in the report cards in some elite schools!)
The building of vocabulary is similarly neglected, so
that word usage remains at a basic and simplistic level,
without much nuance and very little complexity.
Add to this the widely observed phenomenon that children
(and adults) read less and less – especially of classics,
great literature and the like – and it is not hard to
see why language skills are being eroded.
But there is more to it now, of course. New technologies
have changed both the modes of using language and the
exposure to it in the most widely prevalent ways. Written
English has thus been dramatically undermined: first
by word processors, which do all the ''hard work'' of
correcting spelling and finding appropriate words; then
by email, which exonerates all mistakes supposedly committed
by speed and immediacy of response; and now by mobile
phone text messaging, which has created an appalling
new vocabulary of its own.
Spoken English is much more undermined by the entertainment
industry, especially the influence of television, which
is increasingly dominated either by American serials
or by our own variants of reality shows and fictional
serials using the now ubiquitous Hinglish. This is why
we now come across teenagers who cannot speak a sentence
without inserting ''like'' in unlikely places, punctuated
by declaimed pauses, as in ''And uh, I'm, like, wow!''
It is also why many perfectly well educated people are
not even aware that in general parlance they are mixing
up languages (such as Hindi and English) and therefore
messing up and contravening the rules of both.
There are those who will argue that such complaints
are much ado about nothing, the crabby responses of
an old world purist who is not responding amenably to
the changing times. Why do we need to bother with rules
of grammar when we can be understood without them? Why
be obsessed with spelling when the computer will do
the spell check for you? What is the need for syntax
when the basic communication is through a SMS?
This kind of argument misses some critical issues about
language. The first, which is something which will resonate
most sharply with those who see ICT as a future driver
of economic growth in India, is that genuine language
skills are going to become much important for economic
growth than ever before. Indeed, while off-shoring and
relocation of IT-enabled services may in any case be
only minor contributors to India's future growth, there
is little chance of them fulfilling even that limited
role without ensuring greater and more comprehensive
language skills among a much wider population.
But there is a deeper, perhaps much more significant,
issue at stake here. Linguistic philosophers from Noam
Chomsky to Steven Pinker have shown us how language
is embedded in structures of thought, and how the interplay
between language and thought processes is both deep
and intricate. If that is so, could it not be that the
way we use language also reflects the way we are thinking?
If our use of language is sloppy and casual, could it
be that we are also falling prey to sloppy and casual
ways of thought? If our prose communication lacks discipline
and clarity, does it reflect lack of mental discipline
and conceptual clarity? We can go further, since discipline
is ultimately essential for any true creativity. So
if our thinking in individual cases become slipshod
in this manner, then what does it mean in terms of the
social capacity for introspection and creative reflection?
The loss of language then has implications which go
far beyond mere economic disadvantages. It extends to
more worrying effects upon our ability as a society
to generate, among our people, either philosophic understanding
or mental creativity.
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