English Hinglish
Excuse me, do you speak English?
Of course you do, you’re reading this, aren’t you? Thank goodness!
iF u TyP lyk dis, pls swipe left, thx <<<
But hold on a moment, you read that sentence fine, didn’t you?
Sure the spelling was haywire- DM-speak but it was still readable, wasn’t it?
What’s the problem then? Why do I need to type like this and not LYK DIS for you to get what I’m trying to say?
Isn’t that the grand magic of having an intelligent human brain that can decipher words and translate them immediately, despite the typos and the grammar fumbles and the syntax salads?
If Yuo’re Albe 2 Raed Tihs, pehrasp yuo dno’t RAELLY nede teh wrodS 2 b spelt ryt, do yuo?
I had to actively fight my autocorrect (and my poor overworked delightful editor-in-chief) to type that sentence out and you read it fine all the same, didn’t you?
It’s because your brain doesn’t need to read words or even sentences in its completely accurate and perfect form to get what it’s trying to say. Context is often enough and your brain has its own in-built autocorrect that reads the words anyway, even if they’re not in order.
The inherent flaw with this irrational need to be perfect in English speaking and writing is how unnecessary judgment and discrimination follow right behind it.
Have you ever assumed someone was stupid or illiterate because they can’t speak English well?
Have you ever assumed they’re from a poor background because of it and judged them because of it?
There’s a reason your brain reaches for these assumptions – only 6-10% of India’s population is fluent in English, 3% of the rural population are English speakers compared to 12% of the urban population, 34% of college graduates were English speakers compared to 2-8% of those with a high school diploma or less, and 41% of the rich are fluent compared to 2% of the poor .
If you’re a working adult reading this without difficulty, you’re more than likely a college educated individual with a privileged middle to upper class background.
But how about intelligence? How does English speaking correlate with how intelligent you are?
It doesn’t, actually.
Speaking in a language – English or others – is simply a mode of commute for your thoughts, rather than a measure of their quality.
The language you communicate in is one of nearly 7000 tools of communication to convey your thoughts and ideas and beliefs and passions, it isn’t a benchmark for them, and there’s no objective reason why English should be viewed as the superior tool amongst them all.
Our own country has scholars and geniuses that aren’t good English speakers, yet we don’t judge their intelligence based on how well they speak English.
Einstein himself wasn’t fluent in English, making statements like “I will a little tink!” and being more familiar with German, the language he grew up with, and you’d be hard pressed to judge a man whose theories of relativity made him the de facto example of genius.
The notion that English speaking is a prerequisite for intelligence is monumentally absurd and leads us to make the false correlation that well-spoken idiots could be intelligent while broken English geniuses could be unintelligent.
It’s a standard that has no roots in reality and wouldn’t make any logical sense if you dwelled on it long enough. Can you imagine if someone assumed you were unintelligent because of your weak Finnish skills or shoddy Mandarin knowledge or lackluster BANZSL?
I spent a year trying to learn German and if I ever spoke to a German speaker who had the same attitude we do towards English speakers, they’d probably think I’m an absolute moron.
In fact, people who speak broken English are likely more skilled than you are because they’re using a language they weren’t born with and speaking it with enough fluency that they’re able to communicate in it.
I teach kids from underprivileged backgrounds who are learning English as a second language and I can guarantee that their intelligence rivals, if not surpasses, kids from English speaking boujee schools.
Your ability to speak English is no more or less impressive than a native speaker’s ability to speak their own language, yet we persist in tying up English with intelligence to the degree that it creates discrimination against non English speakers in our own country.
They get passed up for promotions, they lose job opportunities, they get judged for how their emails are perceived, they get denied access to higher education institutions, and that’s not even with consideration to the fact that so many schools, especially those that live within the poverty line can afford, aren’t English Medium.
A lot of that discrimination has ancestral colonial classism roots – historically Indians that spoke in English had a better rapport with members of the British Raj and were more likely to rise and amass wealth and power.
Shortly after Independence, there was active debate as to whether English would be introduced into primary schooling systems or as an elective secondary schooling route for those who wanted to pursue it.
On one hand, you had constituents like Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who wanted Indian schooling to go down the socialist egalitarian route, in line with Macaulay’s educational model, where children, rich and poor alike, were taught in the same primary schools in the same languages, so as to receive the same standards of education regardless of class. This would remove the advantages that benefited the privileged class over Dalits and have everyone on a level playing field.
On the other hand, elitism chose differently.
The elite class, supported by Maulana Hasrat Mohani, originator of the phrase inqilab zindabad, wanted their kids to be differentiated from the common classes. The descendants of Indian babus who had grown used to using English as a shortcut to the pockets of the British wanted to retain that privilege and called for introducing English speaking as early as primary schooling, which ultimately resulted in a split of English medium schools and public boards. Over time, the elite favored more English medium schools which caused a rift between how the government treated English speaking schools and non-English schools. And thus a rift in the languages elite classes raised their children with versus the languages that public schools used.
If u tYp lYk diS, it’s fine, honestly, seriously, we need to get over our needless perfectionism of English and our irrational stigma of typos and short-hands.
The first known usage of the word OMG was in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill, do you really believe you’re special and elite for typing words out in full?
Moreover, shouldn’t it be on us to accommodate non-English languages since, at 6-10% of the Indian population, we’re not exactly the majority as English speakers?
Every time you struggle talking to a non-English speaking person, especially in India, in this country you grew up in, ask yourself why it’s on them to know a language that wasn’t even original to India and that a majority of the country can’t speak to begin with.
Ask yourself if it’s fair to expect the rest of the country to accommodate a dated colonial language that your privilege afforded you to begin with, that only permeated our primary schooling because of the elite class leftovers of the British Raj.
Ask yourself if it’s right to judge the intelligence of someone with broken English when it takes actual courage to learn and actively communicate in a language foreign to you.