A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 307
thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien,’ yet
English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual makeup…but
not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us
writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should
not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of
us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to
be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.” 28
Peculiarly Indian features of pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax, which the British
regarded with condescension during the days of the Empire, have in recent years received
more appropriately neutral descriptions from linguists. Certain pronunciations result from
the systematic influence of Indian languages. For speakers of the variety of Hindi that
does not permit sk, st, and sp at the beginning of words, English station is regularly
pronounced with an initial vowel [Iste: šən] 29 In some varieties of Indian English [v] and
[w] are not distinguished, and [t], [d], [l], and [r] are pronounced with retroflection.
Dozens of words and phrases that strike British and American speakers as strange are the
natural expressions of cultural contexts that are absent in Western society. Indian English
is characterized by greetings such as bow my forehead, fall at your feet, blessed my hovel
with the good dust of your feet; abuses and curses such as you eater of your masters, you
of the evil stars, the incestuous sister sleeper; blessings and flattery such as thou shalt
write from an inkwell of your shoe and my head; and modes of address such as cherisher
of the poor, king of pearls, policewala, mother of my daughter. 30 The future of English in
India and the rest of South Asia will be determined by a complex set of social, political,
and linguistic forces. The Indian Constitution of 1950 recognized fourteen Indian
languages, of which Hindi was to be the first national language. English was to serve as a
transitional language with Hindi until 1965, but it has continued to be used as an official
language. Whatever the stated policies may be in the future, it is certain that the English
language will be spoken and written by a small but influential minority of the Indian
population, including leaders in government, education, and the press. It is also certain
that the variety of English recognized as standard in India—and in Bangladesh and in
Pakistan—will be a distinctively South Asian variety in its pronunciation, syntax, and
vocabulary. It will continue to be affected
28
Kanthapura (1938; reprinted New York, 1963), p. vii. Cf. Noah Webster on American English, §
246.
29
Braj B.Kachru, “South Asian English,” in Bailey and Görlach, p. 359.
30
Further examples are given in Braj B.Kachru, “The Indianness in Indian English,” Word, 21
(1965), 391–410.