Salvaging Sinhala and Tamil
 The people of Bogota, Colombia have a reputation for speaking the
best and purest Castilian Spanish in the world. In the same way, the
people of the Jaffna peninsula are said to write and converse in the
most pristine Tamil.
Thus, it was a son of Yarl who began, one and a half centuries ago, a
renaissance in the Tamil language and culture, in South India as well as
in Sri Lanka. Although Arumugam Navalar’s contributions have been
criticised as parochial, conservative, and elitist, there is no
gainsaying their impact on modern Tamil culture.
Arumugam was reacting against what he saw as increasing foreign
pollution of the pure Tamil language and culture. Modern traditionalists
worry about a repetition of this threat: contemporary Tamil pop-culture
is seen progressively to be more contaminated with English. And this
concern extends beyond traditionalists.
For example, a blogger from St Louis notes that, while the
conventional wisdom is that only Chennai people speak Tamglish (a patois
of English and Tamil), there is very little difference between native
Chennaites and other Tamils in this regard. She mentions too, that an
American colleague who had studied linguistics was puzzled at the use of
so many European-sounding words in conversations between the blogger and
her Tamil-speaking friends.
Constitutional provisions
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Bustling Jaffna town. File photo |
Last year, when Dhanush, son-in-law of megastar Rajnikanth, recorded
a satirical Tamglish video called ‘Kolaveri di’ (‘Murderous rage, why
thou female?’) and it went viral on the Internet (viewed by over 60
million), it rubbed a sore nerve.
In the tradition of Arumugam Navalar, a computer professional and
amateur jingle composer, Jerry Stalin wrote and recorded a counter
version, ‘Yarlpanathilirunthu Kolaverida’ (‘Bloodlust from Jaffna’).
Written in unadulterated Jaffna Tamil, the lyrics begin ‘Why this
bloodlust toward my Tamil language?’ and end ‘Jaffna - that place noted
for its classical Tamil/ Tamil, your duty is to protect our Tamil
mother-tongue’.
While Stalin’s high quality You-tube video was not viral on the same
scale as Dhanush’s slick original while it was popular enough, garnering
over 375,000 views - indicating that the traditionalists’ fear for the
future of Tamil is wider spread than one would think.
Of course, Tamil in Jaffna does appear more vulnerable than it in
fact is. The peninsula has emerged from a debilitating, almost
three-decade-long conflict. The outcome might be construed by some as a
triumph of the Sinhala tongue over Tamil, despite the efforts of the
government at enforcing the constitutional provisions protecting the
status of Tamil - which include its primacy in the North and East.
Road signs
This apparent conquest appears especially real to those observing the
linguistic alteration of road signs; previously, only Tamil and English
were allowed signboards on in areas under separatist control, whereas
now Sinhala appears above Tamil. This highly symbolic transformation has
led to accusations that place names have been changed from Tamil to
Sinhala.
This language-anxiety stems from the precarious positions of both the
vernaculars in our society. The truth is that, over 60 years after
independence and a half century after ‘Sinhala only’ and the ‘Tamil
also’ acts, both these languages remain subaltern to English.
Business is, by and large, carried out in English, as is much of the
business of government. Quirkily, whereas the constitution rules that
the Sinhala draft of any law shall be considered primary, in fact that
draft is most likely a translation from an English original.
English vocabularies
So, unlike in many other countries where the vernaculars are
official, in this country there is an actual disadvantage in not knowing
English. This is reinforced by the class and status aspect to the
language, the un-discarded baggage of the colonial era: a lack of
English is less of a disability in education than an inconvenience in
social situations.
The Sri Lankan elite used to think in English; so much so that, when
speaking in their purported vernacular ‘mother tongue’, they would
substitute English words for not easily-recalled Swabasha terms. For
upwardly mobile speakers of the indigenous tongues, this fault became a
symbol of privileged status, an affectation to be aped. This process was
institutionalised by certain television channels, which deliberately
fostered the use of English words instead of Sinhala terms, in
particular. So the substitution of English terms when speaking the
vernacular became the kitschy mode.
The aforementioned blogger cites the use of Tamil ‘etho’, in
conjunction with English ‘something’ - a bilingual tautology. The
upcountry sari, the ‘osariya’ is referred to in Sinhala as ‘Kandyan eka’.
A soldier’s gun is his ‘weapon eka’.
Particularly ridiculous is the new fad, when speaking in Sinhala of
using ‘rice and curry’ instead of ‘buth’ for the staple dish and ‘gravy’
for the ‘hoddha’ eaten with hoppers or roti. Just as crassly, an
aeroplane, earlier an ‘ahasyaanaya’ in Sinhala, is now called a ‘flight
eka’; while computer technicians refer to their disc drive (‘dhruda
diskaya’), as their ‘hard eka’.
In the long term, such tendencies can be combated only by augmenting
the actual (as opposed to the merely symbolic) status of the
vernaculars. English will cease to ooze into the Swabashas when it is no
longer perceived as the superior language of one’s betters.
In the meantime, a first step to stop the rot might be proactive
language coaching, especially on broadcasting channels, to eliminate
inappropriate invasions to the extent that sentences have purely
Swabasha grammars but almost entirely English vocabularies.
What is possible is patent from the transformation in the Sinhala
cricketing vocabulary. When the sport was an elite game of a few
selected schools, the Sinhala terminology employed (notwithstanding the
existing official cricket glossary) was bastardised English: ‘catch eka’,
‘sixer eka’, ‘out vela’ etc.
However, a proactive effort on the parts of all concerned
(particularly the TV and radio commentators) has resulted in the
official expressions being used by Sinhala speakers in general. Similar
exercises in other spheres of human endeavour are certain to do
something towards restoring the dignity of the vernacular languages. |
