We can’t Communicate, Sorry!
If you are an Indian and you are reading this, you belong to the 12.18% fraction of the Indian population distinguished as English speakers in the country. India has the second largest population of English speakers in the world after the United States and closely followed by Pakistan in the third place and this statistics with regards to India are anticipated to quadruple in not less than half a century.
Owing to the multicultural and multilingual diversity of India, English still remains the official governing language of India. After the British left India in 1947, the diversified language sentiments across the country echoed in the constituent assembly debates that was crucial in the construction of India’s constitution and English was decided to be official language only for 15 years to enable smooth transition to Hindi, but English still continues to be the official language after 70 years owing to the same diversity.
Political conditions still insists that the moment we take English away from the Indian equation of language, the north and the south can’t really communicate and creating utter chaos. With upto 22 officially recognized languages, India’s language diversity will pose a serious threat to effective communication within the country and we are more than safe with English. Roughly 25% of the global population speaks English and hence the networkability factor the language provides is not unknown to the Sub-continent dwellers. But this has created a different hegemony in the nation with respect to the vernacular languages.
Is India Vernacular enough?
In comparison with the rise of Roman empire, Latin which was the language of the church was mandated to be learnt by everyone in order to have a common language all across Europe but after the fall of the empire, latin started disintegrating and developed into various other languages such as Romanian, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese which are among the widely spoken languages that developed from latin.
And with the help of this example, Ganesh Devy, Chairman, People’s Linguistic Survey of India in conversation with scroll.in talks about the carrying capacity of any language, he says every language that encounters an enormous growth starts disintegrating and diminishing with the rise of other vernaculars and illustrates this with the decline of Latin and Predicts the same future for Chinese, English and Spanish. According to him, these languages will eventually crack up and evolve into different languages. The below video is the explanation of the same,
The Elite and a considerable share of middle class in India send their children to English medium schools but the major chunk of the population who are poor send their kids to their mother tongue medium schools, this has created a clear hierarchy. The vernacular languages in India is still spoken by 3/4th of the country’s population and this division has been clearly understood by the world’s technological giants like Google. With the boom of internet in India, they have effectively formulated 3V’s that determines the future of internet in India Viz, Voice, Video and Vernacular. Apart from the voice and video as engaging medium of content the dissemination is highly dependent on the vernacular to create a vast and inclusive market in india.
What is vernacular and what it is not?
The word ‘Vernacular’ is derived from a latin word Vernaculus, which means native to any particular region and also refers to proletarian. It also refers to the everyday language spoken by common people in any particular region.
India with a rich and varied heritage of languages roughly has 19500 languages or dialects listed as mother tongue according to the latest analysis of Census. And now internet provides a space for the vernacular knowledge to showcase and has started the symbolic rise of vernaculars in India.
In the present day, English has already started developing into different language dialects such as the African American English, Australian English, Indian English etc., and there are distinct distinguishing divisions in Indian English owing to the geographical locations. With increased internet exposure, there is a awareness slowly creeping within the Indian public about the need to safeguard the various discourses in these vernacular languages.
James Jasinski in his book, Sourcebook for rhetoric quotes bodnar’s view on Rhetoric as, “Previous modes of historical inquiry privileged what Bodnar termed the “official culture” and largely ignored the vernacular. For Bodnar, it is impossible to understand a society’s public memory without devoting significant attention to its vernacular culture”, by which broadly explaining the importance of vernacular discourse in the spectrum of official knowledge.
To efficiently carry out these transmission of valuable information of knowledge from these vernaculars, Ono and Sloop, in their essay ‘The critique of vernacular discourse’ have suggested, “By recognizing that vernacular discourse is culturally syncretic, and may be generated from a pastiche of hegemonic culture, we begin to realize that vernacular discourse cannot be examined as bits and pieces of hegemonic culture itself but, instead, should be analyzed as a whole new hybrid, through its own conditions of emergence. Studies of vernacular culture may force us to examine figures of discourse not according to specific time periods or genres and not according to historical achievements, embarrassments, or acts. We may have to begin the critical practice by asking how an object or set of objects impacts localized communities. The emphasis on community relations does not allow for examination of texts, sans context. This focus allows for a culturally specific approach to discourse that impacts the formation of specific textual moments”.
Hence, proper construction of tools to study the vernacular rhetoric becomes essential and for a country like India this poses as an inevitable transformation needed. However strong the influence of English has been India has remained a largely vernacular nation and its population is mostly bilingual or multilingual and Indians have surpassed the Chinese only in our ability to talk in English. And here is funny video by standup comic Biswa Kalyan Rath funnily explains Indians relationship with English,
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