Sir,
It is heartening to read that the Indian words ‘chana’ and ‘chanadal’ have made it to be a part of the new edition of Oxford English Dictionary.These words have respectively been given the meaning of chickpeas and chickpeas lentils.One of the reasons about the growing popularity of the language of English across the world is that it has included in its vocabulary thousands of words belonging to different languages including French, Urdu, Arabic, Russian, Portugese, Persion, Sanskrit and even Hindi.Many words of Indian origin such as thug, monsoon, pundit, badmash, curry,chuddi, jungly, yaar, bhelpuri, dhaba, didi,desi, ghee, chit, chutney,gora etc have already become a part of the world famous Oxford English dictionary which is the most trusted source of the historical background and meanings of English words, published by Oxford English University.
During the British rule in India, many British officers and traders adopted the local customs, clothes and food and the words related to these things came to be frequently used by them both in India and England.Ultimately, many of them ended up becoming a part of the English language.With the whole world becoming a global family,many words related to Indian cuisine are being increasingly used by people belonging to different nationalities and cultural groups.For example,spice has been replaced by masala, radish by mooli and the like.If a word is finding increasing use across the globe, it ends up in a dictionary and stays there and becomes the English word.The inclusion of more and more Indian words in Oxford Dictionary shows the influence of Indian food, customs, clothes etc on the fast growing multi cultural and multilingual global society.
Yours etc….
Antika Sharma
Udhampur
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