Re: RE: Compulsory English education and Bill 101; contradic
Machjo said:
And where did you get the statistics for that?!
Last I'd checked, 1% of East Indians speak English as a native langauge, with an additional 6% who are at least competent in it. That makes 7% in all, ranging from basic competence to fluency, not to mention that many Europeans, with the exception of native speakers from Britain perhaps, can't understand them because of their pronounciation!
And on what are you basing your statistics, since we're comparing notes?
All the 'good' schools in India teach through the medium of English. For many millions of Indians, into the hundreds of millions, English is the only language of education they've ever known.
And if you want to talk about accents, there are many Americans who have difficulty following British speaking people or Australians. Some can't even understand them and sometimes you see subtitles on American programming when people from Britain and Australia speak! It's ridiculous...but it goes to show that just because Indians have thick accents that make it difficult for Americans or Brits to understand them, doesn't mean that they're particularly unique in that regard.
The
International Herald Tribune puts the number of Indian speakers of English at 350 million.
TESOL also mentions the number of 350 million English speakers though they believe the number is somewhere between an overly conservative 9% figure of 100 million and a perhaps too liberal 33% figure of 350 million.
ABC news puts India as the country with the largest number of English speakers in the world, surpassing the U.S. and the U.K. combined.
Machjo said:
Most East Indian businessmen here in China likewise complain about how it takes alot of time for their Chinese collegues, who only learn British or US pronunciation, to learn to understand their English. And from my own observations, most local Tamil speaking children here in China will communicate with their Hindi-speaking classmates not in Hindi, but in English.
Yes, of course they would. There are two linguistic divisions in India corresponding to geographical realities. There is the north of India, where Indo-European languages predominate (eg. Hindi, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Bengali, etc.) and the the South where Dravidian languages dominate (eg Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telegu). People in the North who speak two or three languages would be likely to learn their local language+Hindi or some other northern language, and rarely do Northerners learn South Indian languages. The reverse is also true that people in the South often speak their mother tongue and will learn some other Southern language among those I've already mentioned. This is the case because it's easier to learn languages that are a part of the same language family as your mother tongue. The result is that people in the South will definitely use English to communicate with those in the north and vice versa. There's also the added political dimension that people in the south are fiercely proud of their languages and resent the national imposition of Hindi on them through gov't, such that they will purposely use English to talk to Northerners to avoid using Hindi.
Machjo said:
Another friend of mine had observed that in the big cities in India, English is becomming the de facto lingua franca, with the local dialects becomming increasingly unimportant, thus building a language barrier between the higher classes of the metropolitan areas who can speak English but whose traditional languages are slipping, and those from the countryside for whom English is still strictly a foreign language taught in school.
There is undoubtedly a class issue related to English that dates back to colonial times. English was imposed on India as the court language of the English Empire, and as such, those belonging to the upper classes of India were the first to learn it and use it in their interactions with the colonial administration. Consequently, even today, the middle class and upper class are more likely to speak English than the lower classes. This is largely due to economics where the middle and upper classes can afford to send their children to good private schools where the medium of instruction is English, as opposed to public schools used by poor people where English is taught as a second language.
No matter what, though, there is instruction in the local languages, and as you've pointed out the number of native speakers of English is quite small in India (though it is huge, in the hundreds of millions, as a second language). There has even been a revival of Hindi lately with hindi becoming increasingly popular throughout India despite gov't intervention to promote the language, largely due to Bombay cinema (Bollywood) which is hugely popular. It also can't be forgotten that while certain areas have less pride in their local languages, others do, and fiercely use their language as opposed to English except when speaking to people from other states in India, or other countries.
Machjo said:
So while it might be that some are bilingual or trilingual, it's certainly not the norm, not to mention that bilingualism and trilingualism can sometimes be limitted to certain fields (for example, while a person might be fluent in Hindi for general daily purposes, can he have a higher level academic discussion in the language if all of his higher education should have been conducted in English? One friend of mine had told me that, though both English and Hindi were her native languages, her Hindi was reserved for non-academic discussion, with English being her only means of higher level conversation!
Bilingualism certainly is normal in India, and is often necessary for economic survival. The only language group that often does not attain fluency in another Indian language (but still learns English) is the Hindi speaking belt throughout Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Dehli, etc., and that's because they're such a huge population. As I mentioned before, it is the common curriculum in India, enforced by law, that all schools must offer the local language+Hindi+English (or Hindi as the local language+Sanskrit or some other Indian language+English) as languages of study.
Your friend is a good example where the study of language is sometimes lop-sided. She is representative of many people who went to private English medium schools in the Hindi speaking belt, who lay less emphasis on their local language. The reason for that is that good English indicates social class, and facilitates upward mobility, such that her family has decided not to stress her learning of their mother tongue. This is characteristic of the region in question. This is sadly quite common in some Hindi speaking families, but other parts of the nation are fiercely proud of their local language and culture and consider speaking their mother tongue a necessity. This kind of situation is also quite common among the NRI (non-resident Indian/ex-pat) community, who do not live in an environment where their mother tongue surrounds them on a daily basis. Some languages have waned in India, others are in a revival. Anyone aware of India is aware of how many people there are bilingual or polyglots...do word searches on those two words in association with India and see the huge number of articles that come up.
