By Thulasi Muttulingam Butchering the Queen’s language is par for the course for us colonised natives. “No problem, no? You understand what I speak?” And that’s all that matters. The purpose of language is communication and not, as some think, getting toffs’ accents, echoing in the corridors of Windsor. Unfortunately, when the British left, we the colonised natives wanted to show them the middle finger by removing their language amongst us. That’s what we told ourselves; or what Bandaranaike and Co. told us to win votes – and we stupidly believed it. And so in came the swabasha policy. Nothing wrong with prioritising your own language of course, but by that time, in 1948, many natives already had a system of education that effectively taught both their own language as well as the Queen’s. As such, many people were effectively bilingual if not trilingual back in the day. All that the swabasha policy achieved was making people monolingual – in a fast-globalising world where English became the de facto lingua franca. It was the language uniting the people of the world for communication purposes because they had all pretty much been colonised at one time or another. Being angry enough with the coloniser who had left by that point, to resort to chucking out their language was simply cutting off one’s own nose to spite one’s own face – which we Sri Lankans are quite good at, so we did it. The only ones left with their noses intact after this were the elites who managed to stay above the very patriotic rules they laid down for the masses – so they continued on with the Queen’s language in their homes and in private education. And their noses tilted even more upwards to show the rest of us they still had it. The sad result of all these machinations soon after Independence is that English is no longer just a language, a mere tool of communication, in Sri Lanka. It is a weapon. Subjugation Across all levels of society, I’ve sadly seen people bully others over the language. “You don’t know even this.” “You don’t know even that?” “Hahahaha – that’s not how it is pronounced.” The goal is always to demean the target – and it’s usually effective. Many Sri Lankans have also internalised a sense of shame over not being adequate in their English, through no fault of their own – so the tactics of humiliation work on them. I move through these corridors of power and shame with the unease of an outsider in both. By class status, I should belong to one bracket (those who don’t have a command of the English language), but due to circumstances – of having my formative years of education abroad after my family fled the ‘83 riots – I belong to the other, the group that does have a command of the language. Even so, my use of the language is nowhere near the Queen’s English, especially pronunciation wise. I have a thoroughly mongrel accent influenced by the vernacular accents of the Maldives, India, and Sri Lanka where I’ve lived my life in different stages – and I’m not ashamed of it. Language to me is just a tool. I don’t care that I don’t have the cut-glass accents of the upper-class British elites, and have always been amused by people who strive to reproduce them in Sri Lanka. Accents are formed by our environment. No matter how much you try, you can’t reproduce the environment of Oxford in Colombo, sorry. And I don’t even know why you’d want to try. Be that as it may, being a non-toff using the toffs’ language (Sri Lankan toffs anyway) can give rise to some hilarious situations. I’ve worked in various sectors where “seniors” and bosses make it a point to undermine staff under them for their “bad” use of English. It appears to be a common Sri Lankan humiliation tactic to control the masses, and I’ve come in for my fair share of it too. “You, junior! Go and write a message on the staff notice board wishing the staff for the New Year holidays.” “Hahahaha – what do you mean, ‘wish you a happy, peaceful, and prosperous New Year?’ It should be “happy, peace, and prosper New Year’. Hahahahaha. Don’t they teach you anything at school?” “You! Write a letter to the bank manager telling him to…(some details).” “Oh my god, what is the meaning of this?” And then said person proceeds to mark all over in red ink, often correcting the right terms, phrases, and grammar with wrong ones, then flings it in my face. “Go and correct that immediately. I am sick of correcting your poor English. Why can’t you learn the language? It should not be my job to correct you.” Yeah, so why insist on doing it then? I was not exempt from this in newspaper offices either. Let me say I have a blatant dislike of most subeditors. As a junior reporter, many’s the time I have had to stand by while an idiot butchered my work with a red pen just to show how superior he or she was in their English. Then ticked me off for my “bad English” and obliged me to correct what I had written into their version of the Queen’s English – except the Queen was long dead on that script. The poor Queen. In our effort to keep her alive, we’ve mangled her many times. Tool not a weapon I am currently an English teacher. I see my role as enabling students who have not had access to the language thus far to master it to the extent that they can effectively use it in communication, for their jobs, higher studies, migration, etc. It’s heartbreaking, seeing so many intelligent Sri Lankans left marginalised by lack of access to learning the language. The way the language is taught in schools right now is a joke. And so, people with so much to contribute have effectively been shut out of the global discourse, of claiming their fair share of the global pie. To whatever extent possible, I would like to work to bridge that gap. So here’s a few tips from a communications professional cum English teacher: · The purpose of language is to communicate. So use words that the people you are communicating to understand · Don’t be obnoxious. It’s just a language, and a foreign language at that. Your command of it just means that you are privileged · Accents form from the environments that formed you. Quit trying so hard. There’s nothing to be ashamed of having grown up in Colombo or Galle. Trying to sound like you grew up in England without ever having set foot there is a recipe for failure. Fake accents grate on everyone’s ears. The purpose again is to communicate, not sound like you have marbles in your mouth · Using big words when simpler ones would do does not show you as having a better command of the language – it just shows that you are desperately showing off. Why? What’s missing within? What’s the inadequacy? It’s coming through loud and clear A front-running politician is meme fodder currently due to use of absurdly constructed sentences in English to sound profound – he just sounds profoundly stupid, which has not been lost on the masses. Don’t attempt to fool the people with big words, especially if the big words don’t amount to anything much. Trying to decipher the politicians’ words, people quickly found out that it made no sense as a coherent whole. He didn’t impress, as he set out to do. He didn’t communicate anything either. He just made an outsized fool of himself. Many professionals in Sri Lanka are unfortunately prone to this – academics especially, but others too. They use a lot of big words without actually communicating anything via those words and then hope that people would thereby assume they are exceptionally intelligent. I work as a freelance editor too. I edit other writings for a fee – most of my clients are academics. Some are brilliant in their work but quite a few throw in a lot of “academic”-sounding words just to sound profound, but ultimately make no sense. When I try to question them on what it is that they were trying to say, it often emerges that they have no idea. Trying to mask weak or nonexistent ideas with big words doesn’t work either. Some so-called highly educated professionals do this too. I once worked under an engineer who thought engineers were a superior race who ought to be bowed and kowtowed to by the common masses. He also had the habit of pulling words out of the thesaurus to use in his everyday vocabulary – I am not joking, I’ve seen him do it. As a general measure of developing your vocabulary, this wouldn’t be wrong, but he sought to make fools of the rest of us with the tactic. He could speak the language reasonably well, so he always used it on monolingual staff with his one big word of the day, then castigated them for not understanding what he was saying. One day, he arbitrarily chose “arbitrary” as his word of the day. “You here, you are doing too much of arbitrary work. Do this, that, and the other.” “You there, write an arbitrary letter to the bank manager.” “You! I told you earlier in the day to do this arbitrary work. Why haven’t you done it yet? How many times must I arbicharily (sic) tell you..!” Poor fellow, by the end of the day, he had forgotten the meaning of the word and we had to listen to his arbitrary diktats which continued on for two more days, before he found another word just as arbitrary. Given that he was running his own company, and the purpose of employing staff was to communicate effectively to them the work he needed done, I never did understand this particular tactic of his. He was wasting money while staff spent time and effort trying to understand exactly what he was trying to communicate to them. Yet, Sri Lankan managers repeatedly do this. For whatever reason, they choose to use the English language as a whip. The day we learn to use it as a tool, and not a weapon, we’ll all make progress. (The writer is a freelance journalist based in Jaffna. All views expressed are her own and not of any organisations affiliated to her)