AISCLI SUMMER SCHOOL: world cultures and literatures in English

Turin, 16-21 September 2013

Teaching/Learning Englishes through South Asian Literatures

Esterino AdamiUniversity of Turin

A linguistic/stylistic/cultural approach to literary texts

• Varieties of English and language variation (pidgins/creoles, cf Roberta Cimarosti’s lecture on the Caribbean)

• English as a postcolonial global language for literary purposes (World Literatures in English)

• Teachers and education discourse in recent literary texts

• The role/function/power of language in postcolonial texts

English in the world / Englishes from a postcolonial perspective

• World Englishes (cf. Braj Kachru)• New Englishes (Platt, Weber, and Ho 1984) = newly grown second-

language varieties• Postcolonial Englishes (Scheneider 2007): = i.e. varieties that have

shared origins in mostly British colonization activities, historical origins and processes

• Extraterritorial English (cf. Görlach, Mazzon)• Language contact in different degrees of intensity: • “the vibrancy of postcolonial literatures in English is heavily

dependent on the healthy existence of other languages and cultures” (Talib 2002: 156).

• Language and identity: “language is associated with identity, indeed, can be said, metaphorically, to construct one’s identity, in many ways: physiological, geographical, social and ethnic” (Ashcroft 2009: 96).

English in South Asia

• South Asia / the Indian subcontinent = India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka

• Varying percentages of population speaking English as a mother tongue / second / third language

• India is the third-largest publisher of English books in the world after the UK and USA (2006)

English in India / Timeline:

• 1600 Constitution of the East India company, with Chartered signed by Elizabeth I

• 1668 The EIC acquires Bombay from Portugal• 1780-95 English-language newspapers start in this period (India

Gazette, Bengal Journal, Bombay Gazette)• 1835 Macaulay Minute on Education • 1854 Wood’s Dispatch• 1857 Establishment of universities in Bombay, Calcutta and

Madras / Mutiny• 1947 Independence from the UK • 1950 Constitution and role of English• 1950s/60s Three language formula• 1962 Official Language Act

Hobson Jobson. The Anglo-Indian Dictionary

Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell (1886)• “Words of Indian origin

have been insinuating themselves into English ever since the end of Elizabeth I and the beginning of that of King James, when such terms as calico, chintz, and gingham had already effected a lodgement in English warehouses and shops, and were lying in wait for entrance into English literature” (p. xv)

• Hobson-Jobson: derived from the Islamic cry at the the celebration of Muhurram ‘Ya Hasan, ya Hosain’.

The position of English in India

• “The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand”. (Salman Rushdie, “Commonwealth literature does not exist”, 1991)

• “English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay”. (Salman Rushdie, “Introduction” to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997).

An 'English goddess' for India's down-troddenby Geeta Pandey BBC News, Banka village, Uttar Pradesh

(15 February 2011)

A new goddess has recently been born in India. She's the Dalit Goddess of English. The Dalit (formerly untouchable) community is building a temple in Banka village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to worship the Goddess of the English language, which they believe will help them climb up the social and economic ladder. About two feet tall, the bronze statue of the goddess is modelled after the Statue of Liberty. "She is the symbol of Dalit renaissance," says Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer who came up with the idea of the Goddess of English.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12355740

Language variation

• All languages vary according to sociolinguistic parameters (e.g. a speaker’s regional origin, gender, age, status or the context of situation)

• Variety = a group-specific language form• Other basic notions = register (stylistically defined

language varieties associated with certain channels, e.g.. spoken/written, or situational contexts, e.g. letter writing, texting, etc.); accent (re: pronunciation), dialect (associated with a certain group of people from a given region or social class/group)

• In the context of communication, what is salient concerns linguistic and situational appropriateness, not some supposedly inherent notion of ‘correctness’ (cf. Teaching/Learning).

Levels of language variation

• Features of language variation are ordered into three main levels of language variation:

• Sound (described in the discipline of phonetics and phonology)

• Words (lexis or vocabulary)

• Structures (patterns and rules of grammar/syntax)

Other variation levels 1

• Morphology = “the study of internal make-up of complex word”; this typically refers to:

• A) word formation: how items combine to form new and complex lexical entities

• B) inflection: the use of endings to express grammatical categories; this can be subtractive (omission of verbal endings, e.g.. *He go) or additive (e.g. mass nouns with plural sign: furnitures)

Other variation levels 2

• There may also be differences in other areas such as:

• Pragmatics: conventions on how to behave, also verbally, in specific contexts, e.g. expressions of politeness, forms of address

• Conceptualization: different cultures may categorize things differently, e.g. numerical units in Indian English: lakh = 100.000, crore = 10 millions (or 100 lakhs). Both words from Hindi

• Gestures: also these can vary, e.g. the way Indians signal ‘yes’ with their head

“The object of this small book is to collect the common mistakes of idiom, vocabulary and spelling which Indian boys make and to obliterate them by exposure. I presume that before boys really set about mastering the contents, they will have been learning English for two or three years and my opinion is that every secondary schoolboy ought to be able to rid his English of the mistakes recorded herein at least a year before he takes his Matriculation or similar examination.” T. L. H. Smith-Pearse (originally published as Errors in Indian Schools, 1934)

“Asian Englishes in the Asian Age: Contexts and Challenges”

(Braj B. Kachru 2009)• “By pluralism, then, we mean the multiple identities

which constitute a repertoire of cultures, linguistic experimentation and innovations, and literary traditions. And they come from a variety of sources. It is in this sense that English embodies multiculturalism. And it is in this sense that English is a global language” (177)

• Canon expansion ← divergence and convergence processes

• “Multi-canons in English have symbolic and substantive meaning: symbolic in the sense that one’s identity is symbolic, and substantive in the way the identity is expressed, articulated, negotiated and preserved in language” (182)

World literatures in English

• “Literary works in English are a valuable source of sociocultural knowledge not easily recoverable from grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks" (Yamuna Kachru & Larry E. Smith, 2008 Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes: 168)

“English made in India” (Geetha Ganapathy-Doré)

• The postcolonial Indian novel has enriched the English language.

• Domains: family relations (amma, akka), caste names (Modali), dress (salwar, khurta, lungi), festivals (Diwali), food (alu gopi, dal, roti), flora (champak)

• These lexical items/expressions not only add local colour, but they aim to depict specific sociocultural contexts.

Code-switching, code-mixing, borrowing

• CS: The phenomenon of beginning an utterance in one language and changing the language mid-course. It occurs at various levels – the word, the sentence and at the level of discourse.

• CS is the alternation of languages in the speech of bilinguals and may have different functions such as quotation, addresee specification, interjection, reiteration, message qualification…

• Code-mixing: “this involves the use of scattering of words in a different language or dialect” (Talib 2009: 142).

• Borrowing: “the introduction of single words or short, frozen, idiomatic phrases from one variety into the other” (Gumperz 1982: 66).

Lexis and discourse

• Lexical items are drawn mainly British English, but also from American English presently. Some words of other origin are used:

• aubergine (BE) – eggplant (AE) – brinjal (IE)

• Okra (BE / AM) – lady’s finger (IE)

Different meanings:

• Some English words have acquired meanings which are different from their original denotation:

• Bearer = waiter

• Hotel = restaurant, eatery

• Convent = a school run by Christians

Restricted items

• Elements of vocabulary that have not entered native varieties of English (these words mainly come from Hindi/Urdu or Sanskrit; borrowings into Indian English from other languages, e.g. Tamil, are rarer)

• Bandh: a closure of all shops and institutions in a place• Raga: patterned melody in Indian music• Puja: ritual prayer• Bhel puri: item in Indian fast food• Acha: good, ok• Idli: rice and lentil cake

Lexical innovation: compounding

• South Asian languages are rich in compounding and this preference extends to local Englishes

• N+N• Auto-rickshaw: a motorised three-wheeler• Hill station: a place in the hills/mountains which

is generally cool in climate• A+N• Creamy layer: the economically well-off sections

of those who belong to underprivileged castes

Forms of address / honorifics

• Social structures in the Indian subcontinent tend to be hierarchically organised. It is considered disrespectful to address older people by their names.

• Aunty / Uncle• Didi (elder sister), bhai (younger or older

brother) (from Hindi)• In southern India: Tamil or Telugu equivalents:

akka (elder sister), anna (elder brother). • Honofiric –ji: Doctor-ji (also spelt as jee)

Style

• Style in many South Asian Englishes tend to be archaic and formal (e.g. fossilised forms of Victorian English):

• Kindly do the needful (cf. the title of the play of Mahesh Dattani’s Do the needful)

• I shall be thankful if you would…

Caliban’s VoiceBill Ashcroft (2009)

• Two key concepts:

• Translation: the movement of text from a source language to a target language

• Transformation: the reshaping of text in a target language by the cultural nuances of a source language

Translation

• Translation in multicultural/multilingual South Asia (in particular in India)

• “Translation into English makes a translator in India. Translating into other languages is simply not on a par with translating English” (Sailaja 2009: 13).

Transformation of language (Ashcroft 2009)

• The function of language is to operate as a metonymy of culture.

• The world language called English is a continuum of ‘intersects’ in which the speaking habits in various communities have intervened to reconstruct the language