Authors: Michael Erard
“We are not one people,” Siddhartha, the ambassador, said to me, referring to Indians. “We are castes and tribes. Anything that divides us, we love.”
It would be gauche for an American visitor to gawk at instances
of this, but they were right there in the Sunday newspaper, with its pages of classified ads for available brides and grooms, who were categorized by profession (architect, doctor), others by previous marital status (divorced, second marriage), and even immigration status (non-resident Indian/US green card). Looking at these pages, you couldn’t say that caste, language, or region didn’t matter:
there were sections for Tamil and Telugu brides, as well as Brahmin grooms. In the weeks I looked, the biggest sections were for Brahmins and cosmopolitans: “Wanted: Slim good looking, educated, vegetarian girl, 30–33 years, 165 cms in India or US for a Tamil US citizen.” “Dubai-based parents invite compatible match for July 73 born 6′1″ very fair handsome US based MS computers working reputed
software company.”
Raju advocates what he calls “rooted cosmopolitanism,” a bilingual ideal in which humans depend upon a central identity, or at least develop one part that’s more neutral. The political order needs to gather those neutral identities as the basis for political unity among its citizens. In a place with so many identities in flux, nothing’s neutral—every language, religious view,
cultural practice, is charged, for someone, somewhere.
English is now considered India’s one neutral language, and it has become a de facto official language in the country. In 2006, a Dalit writer and activist, Chandrabhan Prasad, provoked a media firestorm by calling for Dalits (otherwise known as “untouchables”) to give up Indian languages. English, he said, should be their mother tongue.
His reason? Anything Indian, including Indian languages, reeks of caste discrimination. English is the key to opportunity.
This suggests that, in fact, English is not at all neutral, and the notion is obvious in the painting
Goddess English,
which Prasad unveiled after his speech, depicting the Statue of Liberty standing on a computer, holding
a pink pen. Construction on a temple to this goddess
has already begun in the village of Banka, where a BBC reporter said women singing “
Jai Angrezi Devi Maiyaa Ki,
” or “Long Live the Mother Goddess of English,” could be heard.
“Goddess English is all about emancipation,” Prasad wrote. “Goddess English is a mass movement against the Caste Order, against linguistic evils such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bangla for instance. Indian languages
are more about prejudices, discrimination, and hatred and less about expressions and communications.” Indian languages should just “wither away.”
English gives you access to more education, better jobs, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and especially the high-tech industry, where caste origins begin to be irrelevant. As one Dalit boy put it, “They just assume that anyone working with computers is a
Brahmin.”
“What I speak, if spoken in Hindi,” Prasad said in a newspaper interview, “doesn’t make an impact at all. I am dismissed but if I say the same things in English, I am heard and applauded. Also, you may have noticed that English-speaking people tend to wear suits and matching shoes. Better dressing elevates your position and makes you heard.”
Many Indians also seem to have a restless
linguistic appetite. They talk about learning languages as if it were a natural activity required by the body, such as breathing or eating. Were they obliging my willingness to be amazed (which I didn’t try to hide)? Perhaps. Over and over I asked, How did you learn language X? The same answer would come back: Oh, I picked it up.
A Japanese teacher at the English and Foreign Language University
in Hyderabad told me that her students are “shameless learners”—they’re not afraid of making mistakes, and they love to brag about what they can do. “We’re all conditioned to speak languages in different contexts,” another person said. “You’re open to new sounds. You’re open to new ways of thinking.” A public relations officer at the Microsoft Research lab in Bangalore, a native of the city of
Kolkata, told me that he speaks Bengali and Tamil as mother tongues, learned Hindi and English in elementary and secondary school, and then learned Spanish
in college. Presenting these language repertoires (as I’ve been doing) can seem pointlessly repetitive—until you see that he knows languages in four families.
Then he added that he speaks Kannada.
“How did you learn it?” I asked.
“Well,
I live in Bangalore,” he replied.
“No classes?”
“No, you just pick it up.” He added, “Lots of Indians will say that.” He paused. “Well, you’ll find that mostly with south Indians. North Indians are a little put off by the nature of south Indian languages.” The Dravidian languages are perceived to be harder; plus, people in the north tend to be monolingual Hindi speakers.
In Bangalore, I ate
dinner with Zainab Bawa, an urban studies graduate student who learns languages for her research by hanging out and living with families. “The best way to learn a language is to sit with four-year-olds,” she said, because they don’t talk about very complicated things, and they don’t have high expectations of your time together. They just want to play. She said she learned Kashmiri and Bengali this
way. To learn Kannada, she went to professional meetings, built a list of words that kept appearing, and then asked friends if the words were important. “You don’t pick up the language in a sequential manner,” she said, adding the now familiar refrain: “You just pick it up.”
In what seemed to be a society built around brain plasticity for languages, I wondered if Indians had the same facility
with non-Indian languages. In Hyderabad I visited the French government–run Alliance Française, which offers French classes and cultural programs around the world. Tucked in a back office was Frédéric Dart, a short, bald Frenchman who served as the director of the Hyderabad office. He told me that Indians were remarkably enthusiastic about learning basic French but that they didn’t stay with advanced
classes. There may be a thousand students in the beginner classes, but only thirty in the advanced classes. “They’re the fastest beginners I have ever seen,” he said, “but they leave after one hundred hours, because they have enough to survive.” Before coming to India, he’d been in Japan, where the reverse was true: few Japanese started French classes, but those who did stuck with the language
for years.
I asked Sri’s nephew, a management consultant and journalist who’d been educated in Britain, if he thought south Indians might have a genetic predisposition for learning languages.
“It’s not a genetic predisposition,” he said. “It’s an economic predisposition. If you don’t speak, you don’t eat. It’s as simple as that.” Near his house there was a shopkeeper whom he’d heard speak eight
languages in only five minutes.
What proves difficult, and this was true of the Americans and Europeans we met earlier, was changing their accents. In India, the valuable accent was a neutral one that didn’t trigger the ire of English-speaking American callers. “Indians have a lot of pronunciation problems,” I was told by Joshy Eapen, the owner and founder of the Bangalore School of English,
who is originally from Bangalore. “A lot of Indians can’t understand other Indians in English, because each region has its own accent.”
One example: the English word
zoo
. Because Indian languages don’t have the
z,
the word is pronounced “soo” (in the south) or “joo” (in the north). This sort of native inflection can keep people from getting jobs in the booming call-center industry in Hyderabad
and Bangalore, two huge, bustling cities that are home to high-tech companies and the “business process outsourcing” industry.
Eapen’s school was one of dozens teaching the “soft skills”: team building, negotiation, and English pronunciation. Students were paying him 6,000 rupees (about $126 US) to help them neutralize their accents in English; he himself has a crisp British accent, which he
honed working in Kuwait and Dubai. The courses last for three months, five days a week, two hours a day. “We’re the only place that teaches phonetics,” Eapen said. Other schools teach only grammar, which exacerbates the formality of their grammar school English so that students say “I purchased a book,” not “I bought a book.” Eapen said he starts from scratch, drilling them in phrasal verbs and common
expressions.
As we talked, women sat clustered around computer monitors doing pronunciation drills, then students filed in for class. Most of the women were in their twenties, staff nurses in local hospitals who wanted to move to Canada, England, Australia, or South Africa. A few were housewives who wanted to enter the workforce. Most of the young men were engineers; one was a Catholic priest
(the school turns out to be in a Christian
part of town) being sent overseas. Only one of the students was monolingual; all the others claimed between two and five languages.
I tried to engage them in conversation but found it hard to understand their English. I didn’t expect them to sound American or British, but they weren’t yet intelligible to my ear, accustomed as it had grown over a few
weeks to Indian pronunciations. It was obviously going to take more time.
The drive to speak English is common, but access to English training is politically loaded. If you go to an Indian public school, you’ll have classes in three categories of language: your mother tongue or the regional language, one of the other official languages of the country, and another modern Indian language or a foreign
language.
*
This linguistic smorgasbord comes on top of a curriculum loaded with math and science courses as well as a competitive testing regime.
Rooting around in the library at the Central Institute for Indian Languages in Mysore, I came across a study from the 1970s that hoped to find out if the system loaded too many languages on elementary school and high school students. Impressively, 69
percent of students said in a survey they preferred to learn four or more languages in school. Languages would help their education, get them good grades and jobs, and give them a way to talk to people and enjoy mass media, they said. Only 28 percent said they wanted to study just three languages.
Though they were all enthusiastic about language learning, they also said it wasn’t easy for them.
Nearly half of both boys and girls said that different grammars were an obstacle, as were lack of opportunities to practice. The parents who were surveyed agreed with their children: 61 percent of them wanted their kids to study four or more languages, again for very practical reasons—to get a job, to travel, or to get more education. The economic predisposition prevailed.
Human brains don’t
handle languages; they handle bundles of electrical signals that are more or less distinct, that can’t be allowed to interfere
with each other, and that fade or strengthen over a lifetime. When I ask the question “How can brains handle so many bundles?” it sounds as if I’m marveling at south Indians (or any multilingual) through the lens of monolingualism. “If you were writing a book for a
montagnard
or a Dutch audience,” anthropologist Leslie Moore (who does fieldwork among Cameroonian tribespeople) wrote in an email to me, “you would ask a different question: Why do so few Americans speak more than one language?”
I know why so few Americans speak more than one language: a large geography and distant borders; a culture of assimilation; an indifferent educational system; and a mother tongue
that also happens to be (at least for now) a global lingua franca. To the Dutch or the Cameroonians, American monolingualism must make a boring story. What they might find compelling is an explanation of why they know
only
six languages, not ten or twelve.
The easy answer is that individuals respond to their cultural and linguistic environment, speaking as many languages as are around them. But
in the part of Cameroon that Leslie Moore and Scott MacEachern knew, thirty languages are spoken, and neither of them had mentioned a case of someone who knows all thirty, even to varying levels. The groups in the marriage system along the Vaupés River speak twenty-five languages. No one speaks all of them.
Why not? If a given person in these communities could learn as many languages as he or
she needed, why does the motivation to acquire language stop expanding
exactly
at the drop-off of utility? It’s like saying that your hunger will be sated by the amount of food on your plate. Utility does have its limits. But it’s ad hoc to suggest that individual motivation drives higher linguistic proficiency and then to claim that motivation has run out where the repertoire does.
Perhaps there’s
an economic limit. In an “unseen hand” sort of way, individuals calculate the utility of knowing a language (including the costs of learning it) against the costs of not having it. Using game theory, the political scientist Josep Colomer once figured out the optimal number of languages you’d have to speak in order for most of your interactions with some random person—who may be speaking some
other language—to be successful. A “successful interaction” is defined
as one in which you know the language of the person you meet. (The game doesn’t account for differential abilities that exist in real multilingual societies.) In this game, monolinguals have many failed interactions. So do bilinguals, especially if their society has more languages. Colomer calculated that the optimal number
of languages to speak, if a given society has ten languages, is three.
Living in that environment, someone who speaks three languages will have successful interactions 89 percent of the time. The reason that three would be optimal is that the utility of learning a third language is much higher for a bilingual person in this ten-language society than the utility for a trilingual learning a fourth.
Yet a lot of people—as I saw in south India—learn
more
than three languages.
A more complete answer is possible if you ask how much of our brains we’ve evolved to devote to languages. What’s the cognitively optimal size of the linguistic patchwork? How much can someone devote to their linguistic multicompetence? Because we have to use our brains for other things, the patchwork can’t be too large.
As a consequence, we balance the social benefits of knowing languages with the expense of having to keep them sorted in our minds. One can imagine the evolutionary advantages that more competent individuals would have (more mates, more economic advantage, perhaps more social power). Of course, individuals’ abilities vary. Even in one or two languages, some kids talk earlier than others. Some
adults talk more and faster; others talk less, use fewer words, and have smaller vocabularies. Even controlling for educational differences, they differ in their linguistic abilities. And yet they would all count as native speakers.