English anguish

‘Our own experience shows,’ President Mahinda Rajapaksa told the 9th International Language and Development Conference on Language and Social Cohesion on Monday, ‘that language can be an instrument of division and conflict.’

He continued that Sri Lanka is trying use language to bind our people together. The government is committed to securing the language rights of all communities and to transforming the country into a trilingual society, and English was to be used as a link language.

What President’s words entail is the conversion of a multilingual society made up of essentially monolingual communities into one comprised of one multilingual community.

That this is possible is proved by the existence already of multilingual language communities, for instance Bohras, Malays and Sindhis - who, in addition to their mother tongue, speak English, and the two main languages of this land.

Language policy

Now, the learning of English in Sri Lanka has been fraught with impediments, not the least of which is that caused by myth.

For example, the language policy of 1956 has been blamed for the alleged decline in English knowledge. The truth is that, at that time only five percent of the population were proficient in English, the then official language, whereas the figure was 13 percent two decades later.

This is despite the fact that, as part of the ‘brain drain’, a substantial proportion of the English speakers of this country had sought fresh pastures abroad. Significantly, about half the Burgher community, who speak English as their mother tongue, migrated to Australia.

The major impediment to English learning has been the absence of teachers proficient in the language, and the brain drain has not helped. It was for this reason that in the 1970s a commission found that comprehensive teaching of English from Year One was not feasible.

Insufficient resources

To increase the number of English teachers it is necessary to have a larger pool of English speakers. It was for this reason that in the mid-70s Shakespeare was abandoned in school textbooks in favour of the more relevant (and more easily understood) Bob Dylan.

The commission also found that there were insufficient resources available for translation into Swabasha to keep pace with the rapidly changing pace of technology - an indispensable requirement for a relevant tertiary science education curriculum.

However, it is another myth is that people learn English in order to better their education and skills - which laudable aim is the avowed policy of the government. In actual fact they do so to enhance their employment opportunities and their status.

A candidate for employment, proficient in English stands a 100 percent chance of getting a job, and at a salary on average two to three times higher than that of a non-speaker. This is because, language policy or no language policy, English remains the language of commerce.

As for status, the elite in this country use English as a social excluder. The non-English speaker was a ‘Yakko’, a ‘Sarong Johnny’ or a ‘Bolawathi’; even the wealthiest remained a ‘Mudalali’ - although his children might achieve the desired status after learning the Queen’s tongue.

English-speaking elite

The de facto official language of this country, notwithstanding constitutional provisions, has remained English, simply because it is the jargon of the elite. It remains the lingua franca of the public service; and, ironically, even of the legal draughtsman.

English is a fetish commodity, a possession to be acquired by those desirous of status. This in turn has led to the formation of bastardised argot of the Sinhala language, meant for those who may possess an English vocabulary but no knowledge of how the grammar works.

This argot inserts strings of English words into essentially Sinhala sentences.

It may have arisen from the habit of native English speakers, when speaking the vernacular, of inserting an English word or phrase when they have difficulty remembering the vernacular equivalent.

International arena

It was (and remains) customary for the English-speaking elite to laugh at errors made by those less adept. This has been a most serious hindrance to people developing their English skills: they were simply afraid to speak, an enormous drawback in learning a language. This fact lies at the heart of debate about the use of ‘Standard Sri Lankan English’. The English spoken in this country varies quite considerably from that of Oxford or London or Manchester. It is spoken much faster, has its own idiom and is virtually incomprehensible to an outsider.

The approach of the government, personified by Presidential advisor Sunimal Fernando, has been to get English proficiency out to as many people as possible.

This necessitates the use of Sri Lankan Standard English. This has been basic premise behind ‘Speaking English Our Way’ - which aims to free students of the fetters of the ‘correct’ pronunciation. We must be able to walk before we can run; we must be able to talk before we can enunciate ‘properly’.

It could be argued that the use of Sri Lankan English trammels communication with the outside world. This is, to a certain extent, true.

However, this has certainly not stopped Scottish people, for example, from speaking in their own bewildering dialect.

In the international arena, we no longer need to communicate principally with native English speakers from Britain or the USA. Our own dialect is sufficient for talking (albeit with some difficulty) to a Chinese or a Russian or a Qatari.

The development needs of this country demand the use of English as spoken by a Sanath Jayasuriya rather than by a Kumar Sangakkara. The acquisition of social status, on the other hand, requires it to be the other way around.