THE CHARMS OF SPOKEN ENGLISH (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)



Whether you hear Radio Nepal, the BBC, CNN or the Voice of America, there’s no such thing as ‘correct spoken English’. There is no standard as such, even though the Queen’s English is regarded as a measuring yard. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘No two British subjects speak exactly alike.’ Whether you have a Cambridge, Oxford, Cockney, provincial or colonial dialect is immaterial. You don’t have to be shamed of it. A Freiburger Badische slant is just as good as a Texan drawl.

Being understood is the point. You try to express, not impress. You speak presentably. There are naturally circles wherein your choice of words should stamp you as a cultivated person as distinguished from an ignorant one. That is where either one puts one’s best foot forward and throws in all the rules of rhetoric and the performing arts and makes a show of it, or perhaps makes a fool out of oneself. But that’s another matter.

It all depends upon whether you’re from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the British Commonwealth or some other Anglo-American area. Or even Kathmandu or Timbuktu. Take these two German friends of mine, Moni and Yogi Rudolph, who visited Nepal sometime ago. Moni’s an English teacher who now works in a bookstore in Kenzingen, whereas Yogi is a trained-geologist. When they came in contact with Nepalese people in the countryside during their Jomsom trek or even in Kathmandu, Moni put on her best accent with the result that the people didn’t understand her at all. Yogi, however, with no English background, spoke Ginglish (German-English) with the verb always at the end of the sentence, in a slow soft-spoken manner and always managed to get his message across.

And that’s the point. You have to adapt yourself every time to the person you’re speaking with, not only in your choice of words and expressions, but also pronunciations. With an academician you could afford to adopt an elaborate style, letting your fantasy run, dashing out warmed-up idiomatic and current expressions and bombastic words with a bit of Latin and French thrown in. But when you’re talking to a simple, honest-to-God farmer or Sherpa along the trail, you have to switch into a simple, restricted language, without jargon. And yet there are people who go through life without having understood this simple rule.

A foreign student from India at the local Freiburger Goethe Institute once asked an American girl: ‘Vat is the medium auf instrukshun in yer kuntry?’ The baffled American student’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of boomerangs and her mouth opened. She hadn’t understood a word. One must admit that it does take quite sometime before you can train your ears to a new accent or a new dialect. The Indian student had asked: ‘What-is-the-medium-of-instruction-in-your-country?’. It must have sounded like a sack of potatoes being unloaded on a wooden floor. The student meant to say, ‘In which language do you teach in the USA?’ Some features of English as spoken in the Indian subcontinent are: ‘Arre baba, he be God. Or Vat-are-you-doing? Salman Rushdie’s writings are replete with such gems. Most travellers to the subcontinent are confronted with the question: ‘Where-you-come-from?’ Two tired, blonde women from Sweden I met at Tiger Hill in Darjeeling complained that they were not in Asia as ambassadors, but merely as tourists, and wanted to enjoy the sights and not be pestered by scores of people asking them:’ Vich-kuntry-you-are-from?’

India has over 50 million jobless people, in comparison to Germany which has 4.5 million, and the frustration in applying for government jobs goes thus: ‘Indian gorment, no good gorment. Apply, apply , no reply. British gorment, goode gorment. Morning apply, evening reply’.

When I listened to Elvis Presley singing ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog’ which is a case of double negation, my aunty Mrs. Dong who was a teacher with King Edward’s Own Gurkha Rifles would say, “Eh pagla! Don’t listen to such American songs. You’ll spoil your English’’.

In Germany for instance, the people in Baden have a totally different accent and dialect than those coming from Bavaria or even from Schwabenland. As a foreigner you tend to understand the conversation only in snatches. The Badener pronounces the word ‘sympathy’ as though it were ‘symbady’. Which incidentally reminds me of some of my Newari college friends in Kathmandu who have problems with the word ‘that’, which is pronounced ‘dat’, (der = there, hot = what, iz = is). Newari is a language with monosyllables and is spoken in the Kathmandu valley.

It makes the language colourful though, and one can only say: vive la difference! Patience and goodwill helps. Or as the Germans say: one has to speaks with one’s hands and feet. And gesticulate a lot.

Just as English is taught in Nepalese schools by teachers who have no real contact with England or America or the Anglo-American way of life, there are also teachers in Germany who teach their pupils German-English, with the result that a lot of students have inhibitions about speaking a foreign language, scared that one might make slips. As though to err wasn’t human at all. One must admit that the chances that a German teacher may go to England or the USA to widen his English-horizon is bigger than that of a teacher in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. As a result one learns only idioms and expressions that are passed along the grapevine.

However, it is remarkable to note that a good many English words have come to stay in the Nepalese conversation, if not Nepalese literature. Words like: habituated, hobby, compulsory, cinema, TV, entrance-exam, syllabus, boring, restricted and disturb. The list increases with the passage of time.

Recently, one was with some people from London and Liverpool at a cocktail party and one said one came from Nepal. It was amusing to hear, “Oh, Nepaul?’’ The red-haired woman had been fed on Kipling, I suppose, with all those nautch-girls, snake-charmers, sepoys and wallahs.

Names are always distorted by foreigners. And so are most words. During my visit to Ilam in eastern Nepal in 1995, a bus driver used English words with a nonchalance that was really disarming. Words like ‘birik’(brakes), ‘esteering’ (steering-wheel), ‘turuck’(truck), and his companion who cleaned the car was a ‘kilinder’. On the other hand, my German grandma who watches spy-thrillers in TV is fond of James Bond whom she calls ‘Rogger Mooray,’ because the last letter is always pronounced in the German language and not silent.

Have you heard a Frenchman speak English? I used to know a young man named Pascal originally from Paris but I met him in Neufchateau, and he had the habit of beginning his sentences with: ‘I preferrr...’ in that funny, elaborated way. When one heard that, one thought the Nepalese school-kids who do the School Leaving Certificate exams are much better off with their knowledge of English as a second language. It’s just that we pronounce the words with a Nepalese flair.

Spoken English does have its charming side. You can made it a game to find out the origin of the speaker, for despite the much cultivated attempt to speak a foreign language, you can at most times discern the rough geographical origin of the person talking. And that makes it all the more amusing.

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Satis Shroff is a writer living in Freiburg (Germany)
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Reader's response:

Dear Satis,
Interesting!
As a Scot - I speak 'English' English in my working day - but at home we speak Lallans - a lowland version of the Aberdonian 'Doric'... Now, some may argue they are merely dialects... but many Scots would beg to differ!

Robert Burns' poetry is written in Auld Scots, which was the Lallans of his day. For most who cannot understand his written words, it must obviously BE a foreign language!
Ishbel R. commented Mrz 2,2007

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