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English as "associate official language"
Introduction
In
India,
English plays a basic role. The British Colonial administration
employed it and
encouraged its use as it wanted to an elite " Indian in blood
and
colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and intellect" (T.B.Macaulay). [E1] [E2] [I1] [S1]
To a certain extent, this promotional policy got the expected results:
English
represents one of the most important languages as it's used in the
Administrative Service and in key-fields such as education,
science and
technology and, incredible enough, the country with the largest
number of
English speakers in the world is…India! Indeed, English is
virtually
the first language for many educated Indians and the second one
for bi-
or multilingual Indians who use it as a second language in different
official
contexts
According to the linguist David Crystal [E1], a couple of
years ago,
Indian population reached a billion people. If you take into account
that a
1997 'India Today' survey suggested that about a third of the
population has
the ability to carry on a conversation in English, you'll infer
that
there are around 350 million English speakers in India - more than the
combined
British and American population..
But...what is English official status?
In a country in which sixteen national languages (Assamese,
Bengali,
English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya,
Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) and 1,652 dialects
coexist,
Hindi, spoken by one-third of the population, is the official language
and
English is defined as the "associate official language" .[E1] [E2] [F1] [F2].
A heated debate rises from this intricate linguistic situation: what
language
to teach at school? how do you offer a common code, by safeguarding
minority
rights?
Since the late 1950, schools has adopted the "three language formula"
which consists of providing education in the regional language, in
Hindi and in
English.
Although, this integrative approach, has not been very fruitful
as,
statistically, the number of English speakers hasn't meaningfully
increased,
English has maintained a sort of hegemony in several areas: a
large
number of books, magazines and newspapers are published in English.
Moreover,
people are stimulated to learn it to raise their chances of finding a good
job as
it is felt as "the language of power and prestige".
It's worth highlighting that English is not only educated people's
prerogative:
it also serves as "lingua franca" to cover social and cultural gaps. By
using code switching [E1] [F1] (the
change from one to another language) and code mixing
( the use of elements of one language within communication which
is basically
to another) various aspects of the speaker's identity can be revealed.
Info taken from Gramley, Patzold, A
Survey of Modern English, Routledge, London,1992
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