Fanny Gupta
Indians, generally, don’t teach accent (stress pattern) in school. Pronunciation? Yes. Just a smattering of it while the lessons are being read. Few teachers, if ever, compel the use of the dictionary, explain the use of pronunciation symbols or of the strokes used for accent or stress pattern in words. I remember how for years I did not know what the strange oblique brackets and strokes meant. I didn’t think it necessary to ask my Anglo-Indian or Italian teachers about their strange presence of these strokes. Just as well! Maybe, if I had, they wouldn’t have known the answer, for I assume they weren’t trained in phonetics, either. I wonder if their British teachers had been trained in phonetics before 1947! Indeed, what was the need? After all, the native-speakers acquire the sound patterns of their mother tongue as naturally as they breathe the air around them!
Every Indian student, in those days- I wouldn’t dare to say nowadays – read the words or sentences in the school books without the awareness that the rhythm of English shouldn’t match the beat of their regional mother tongues. Perhaps this ignorance and the subsequent neglect of accent was the result of the teaching habits of the British themselves! When they taught English in India for two hundred years they assumed that the students would pick up the accent from them. They were right! Whatever be the reason why the educational authorities in British India and in Independent India did not, as a policy, include the compulsory use of phonetics in the English language classrooms, in the subcontinent, the result is there, now, for all to hear. We have a plethora of accents and regional language rhythm in the English of not trained in the use of the dictionary.
Strangely, the dictionary is neglected. English can never be a grass-roots language in the sub-continent even if “350 million” Indians speak it. Villagers and small town folks can’t be expected to know the music of a strange language they don’t hear at home. I have noticed that the ordinary South Indian picks up Hindi much faster than English. This is quite natural because the sound patterns of English are alien to the ears of any small town residents. Additionally there was the post Independence euphoria- English was retained only as a library language! No need to speak it!
There is a look of complacency on an Indian face when the speaker is fluent. I am happy for him and cannot, for the sake of good manners, tell the person his pronunciation slips or that his accent could improve if only he looked up the dictionary. (Please note that words in a Standard English dictionary is marked with strokes.) I notice that he shows enthusiasm in learning without the effort of looking up that thick dust-covered volume on the shelf, neglected ever since it was bought. Interestingly, most students bring to class, after much insistence, of course, mini-dictionaries which don’t have pronunciation symbols and accent strokes in them. Others bring dictionaries that their great grandfathers had used. Some yuppie types don’t see the need to bring any at all.
I can say with certainty that the sound pattern of the English language has not obtained the attention that it required, by school managements, even in English Medium schools for more reasons than one. This is an inconvenient precedent and must be corrected if we do not want another language added to the plethora of creoles so happily co-existing in India. After all, what is needed is a will to add compulsory phonetics to the school syllabus and to ensure that all the teachers using the English medium must go for crash courses in ‘Speech and Accent’ as the employees of Out-Sourcing are made to do. Way back in the old days I remember the teachers of biology and science – excellent teachers all- make all those mistakes in pronunciation and accent both in North and in the South of the sub-continent. They became the butt of jokes!
Aren’t our film stars and news readers projecting good English? Many of them speak very well. Amitabh Bachan does! That made me his fan, when I was young. Many of the stars come from good English Medium schools. Kabir Bedi couldn’t deliver his Hindi lines well because of his English accent. Even that cool girl, Zeenat Aman, couldn’t! That’s the other side of the coin. No need to worry! It is possible to master both Hindi and English and keep the patterns of both without appearing ridiculous. Mr. Bachan is a good example of this. He is, what is known in linguistic parlance, a co-ordinate bilingual. Your children can be the same too!
We would not have to wince in embarrassment when we hear the pronunciations and accents of some politicians and officers on television, or hear Indian English being the butt of jokes in advertisements, radio and television. Besides, I hope my foreign students of Dubai will forgive me for quoting them: “I cannot understand what many of the Indians speak, but I can understand you,” they say. I reply: “There are many who speak rather very well whom perhaps you don’t meet. You see, we are a billion plus in India and our English is as different as are our levels of instruction in schools and our social backgrounds!”
We have approximately 33 million or more very rich in India and 550 million middle class. What a figure! (No wonder I happen to sometimes read articles by westerners who feel their Queen’s English threatened!) What happens to the rest of the 400 million who do not have the resources to compete in this global environment? Indian teachers of English of the non-elite institutions are constantly exposed to the needs of the underprivileged, and it is the ordinary school and college teachers and students whom I particularly have in mind when I feel that we are making English, unnecessarily, into another Indian language by ignoring its original sound patterns. It would be much less complicating if more and more regional teachers’ training institutes got experts to train the young aspirants of the teaching fraternity and later on if the latter consistently insisted upon their students to open their Oxford dictionaries, look up the vocabulary with its pronunciation and accent so as to, later on, enable their global partners in business and society to understand them better and not come to us for redress at the wrong age.
In the Central Indian Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, both pronunciation and accent were sacrosanct, when I was a student there. In fact, they noticed you in that august academy of English when you opened your mouth to introduce yourself and then all eyes turned to you if spoke with regular accent and good pronunciation. He or she was then marked to read Shakespeare’s plays on Radio Hyderabad. The Indian teachers of English who go through its training schedule for four or eight months are somewhat well equipped to deal with the diverse spoken forms that have proliferated from the Himalayan foothills to Kanyakumari at the land’s end. Regional Institutes have been enthusiastically opened to withstand the continuous erosion of Queen’s English by steady currents of legitimate regional language rhythms and sounds. Hopefully these institutions implement the neutral variety of Standard Indian English if not the rather elite R.P. (Oxford & Cambridge variety) which is more admired than practised by Indians for good psycho-linguistic reasons.
India has several channels devoted to broadcasting in English. It is a welcome addition to South Indians in the North and to expatriates in particular. Today one can listen to the educated public of India in English and feel the proud nationalism and openness of mind of a Prannoy Roy and a Barkha Dutt. They speak English that is close to BBC English and prestigious because it is intelligible to educated English speakers in all countries of the world.
Luckily, educationists have taken note of the problem especially since globalization has set in. Most have introduced phonetics in the college syllabus. But the school is the place to start. Who are there to model the non-Indian sounds to the learners? Are there enough trained teachers around? Members of the faculty in the other disciplines are indifferent, to say the least.
Our educationists are often good entrepreneurs. They showcase the best of their students in elocution contests, poetry recitals and debates and carry away cups. What happens to the majority of the students who have neither the environment to model themselves on good speakers or have a literature oriented syllabus made by generations of literature trained English teachers in India or in settlements abroad? Linguistics and Phonetics have been introduced as compulsory papers but students find it difficult to understand without expert coaching. What happens to them? Will they be left out in the race for jobs in marketing, in outsourcing and in the multifarious competitive fields where standard spoken English does matter? Indians get good jobs abroad for their expertise in accounts, science, and technology, but many are also dismayed by the inability of the foreigners to follow their pronunciation and accent. Frankly, some of those who work under the British or Americans or Arabs in Dubai, for instance, are asked to go for a course in English. At this time when they come to us they are much older and their speech patterns fossilized. To change their accents and pronunciation is an up-hill struggle, sometimes with no destination in sight!
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