Empowering nation and use of English

A country’s human resource is the determining factor of the rate and scale of that country’s development. Sri Lanka having realized this introduced free health facilities to make a healthy nation and free education to literate the masses after independence.

These measures evidently bore fruit when the new nation achieved a high literacy rate and high life expectancy. Yet there is one area in which the nation’s progress has been thwarted for the past 62 years and that is in the area of empowering the nation.

Empowering a nation means making every member of the nation a stakeholder in its social and economic development and it is the national language through which everybody expresses themselves facilitating this empowerment.

This is a crucial area in national development and without this empowerment even the gains made in health and education could become meaningless. Countries like China and Japan and even comparatively smaller countries like Korea have made rapid progress during the past 50 years due to empowerment of their human resource through the use of their national languages. Finland with only five million people is one of the most prosperous countries in the world and it uses its national language, Finnish.

Empowering the nation

The importance of empowering the nation is that it makes every member of the country feel that he or she belongs to the nation and has a contribution to make towards its development and well-being.

Thus that bestows self-confidence and a sense of oneness that brings forth the talents and capabilities of every member enabling the State to harness its human capability to the optimum in national development.

Sri Lanka’s national policy on language has wobbled for the past 60 years since it has been mired in controversy since independence. English was the official language in this country for 138 years (from 1818 to 1956) but at the end only six percent of the populace had a working knowledge of the country’s official language. That was a situation which limited the empowerment of the country’s human resources making the majority in this country remains powerless and in the dark.

Even after 60 years of independence, though Sinhala and Tamil have been made State languages, English continues to remain the most beneficial language in terms of status, employability and privilege. Ironically, Sinhala and Tamil are today called ‘mother tongues’ implying that English is the ‘Father’s tongue’ and the father naturally plays a dominating role in the affairs.

Colonial legacy

The situation in Sri Lanka, 62 years after independence has not changed much, vis a vis English and it is only about 10 percent of the country’s population that is competent in the language and they with their colonial legacy continue to remain the de-factor ‘decision-makers’ of the nation. This, tragically makes the balance 90 percent of the population, born to this country, live and die with an inferiority complex for ‘not knowing English’, with their capabilities and talents unutilized. Thus how do we develop a country when 90 percent of its population under performs lacking in self-confidence?

To cover up this tragic situation we have developed a blanket argument and that is ‘English is an international language and we as a nation cannot do without empowering ourselves with the vast knowledge available in that language’. Yes we have to empower the nation with international knowledge but despite all the English we enjoy, how many competent translators do we have to empower the vernacular educated with international knowledge? Today with the use of IT, it is possible to develop ‘translation software’ to empower the vernacular masses.

National leaders

The fact that learning English helps the learner with his own personal advancement is beyond debate but what is debatable here is whether this use of English, commercially, educationally, socially etc. to create a national dichotomy is more injurious to the nation as a whole? ‘Without English we will be like frogs in the well’ but the irony is when every frog who learns English gets out of the well there won’t be an improvement of the remaining frog population in the well. The JVP revolts every 20 years instigating the vernacular educated due to this lack of empowerment.

The British probably impressed upon our leaders that there is no development without learning English. Hence we have tried to learn English for the past 62 years and today we neither have English nor development. With the emergence of new economic giants like China, Brazil and India, the position of English as the passport to international acceptance could become increasingly questionable in the future. The biggest role English played during the past 62 years in this country is in making our national leaders ‘think English’ on local problems. Chandrika Kumaranatunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe are two typical examples of this thinking. They were grappling with an ‘ethnic conflict’ and brought this country to the verge of collapse. Fortunately President Mahinda Rajapaksa had no ‘Anglicized hangovers’ and hence he saw ‘terrorism’ and eliminated it.

Those who studied in Swabasha here go to Russia, China and Japan and learn their language within months. But here in Sri Lanka we teach our students English for 10 years and still they cannot get a simple pass. This is because English in Sri Lanka is not a language but a status and hence you cannot learn it but you have to inherit it.

The issue here is not learning an international language but this servility to only one language? The best automobile technology is in German; hospitality industry is French; construction is Korean, literature is Russian, electronics are increasingly becoming Chinese. Thus by confining ourselves to one language we have closed many other avenues of international empowerment.

Therefore empowering the average Sri Lankan would take place only when English reverts back to its value as a ‘life’s skill’ from its present position of a ‘status symbol’ that divides the nation. [email protected]