article on English in India

[Guest guest]

My article titled "Anglophonic Hegemony and Indian Languages" has been published

on

Sulekha Expressions.

 

Here is the link to it:

http://sulekha.com/expressions/articledesc.asp?cid=307901

 

Comments and reactions are most welcome,

 

svasti,

 

Bharat Gupt

Associate Professor, CVS, Delhi University,

Founder member and Trustee

International Forum for India's Heritage.

PO Box 8518, Ashok Vihar, Delhi 110052 INDIA.

mobile: +91-98100 77914

home phones: +91-11-2724-1490,+91-129-2276223

email: bharatgupt

homepage: http://personal.vsnl.com/bharatgupt

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, Bharat Gupt <bharatgupt@v...> wrote:

 

It is certainly a very interesting article. While I have no comments

to offer in the part of the article recounting history of English

etc, one sentence in the 'crystal ball' section of the article caught

my attention:

 

QUOTE

A new commercial growth in India free from state controls promises

rosier days for the Indian languages.

 

UNQUOTE

 

This sentence as indeed the whole section seemed to be written

totally from the point of view of the anticipated prosperity of the

Hindi language.

 

For languages like Tamil on the other hand, globalization promises to

be a death knell more than anything else. Tamil lives virtually only

in the audio visual sense, that too in a big way only in the world of

entertainment.

 

Globalization and all the service jobs that are there for the asking

seems to be skew priorities in education esp language education in a

particular direction. So courses like marketing, telephone

communications which were considered infra dig by school level

educators have now become respectable. In terms of preference of

languages, it has become necessary for everyone to acquire a good

command of internationally accepted version of English. This reduces

the local language to the level of a patois or pidgin. This

transforamtion is already well underway since the Back Office

revolution is now more than 15 years old in south India. Educators

have also woken up and now know what sells. Private schools in

Chennai are the bellweather in this respect.

 

I shudder to think what Indologists would do 30 years from now - they

will have to travel to Edison, NJ for native informants

 

Regards,

 

Lakshmi Srinivas