Telugu notice comes in English

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http://www.deccan.com/home/homedetails. ... %20English

I don't think the website will contain that article for long, so i'll quote it here:

I found it quite hillarious. There are 23 official languages in India although 6000 (incl dialects) are spoken, Telugu is the official language of my state (with urdu recognised as a minority language), half a century ago, it used to be Urdu as a Muslim King ruled this land until India illegally occupied it. English was introduced in India by the British colonialists, and India currently has the highest speakers of English in the world, although by 2nd language and not fluently. The state government here, as of 2005, has passed two weird laws: firstly, Telugu will be taught compulsorily in state schools (i managed to escape this, luckily), secondly, all Telugu-medium schools will be converted into English medium schools slowly within the next 30-50 years. Now they send a notice to shopkeepers in English, telling that they will go to jail if their signboards are not in Telugu. Ironic, as most shopkeepers hardly know a few words of English, it's mainly the rich & middle class who speak English, shopkeepers belong to the lower middle class, who hardly speak English, and most of the poor can't read or write their own native language.

Last edited by Khan_Sama on 30 May 2008, 3:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

How do you think it ought to be dealt with?

Eventually, English is going to replace the existing languages spoken in the sub-continent of India, just as Latin replaced the languages spoken in western Europe, as how Arabic replaced most semitic languages, as how Sanskrit replaced the dravidian languages spoken in northern India, etc. History repeats itself. As soon as English replaces the languages, it will break into several dialects, which will eventually become mutually unintelligible, and will become independent languages. The whole process will last around a millennium. There's one really simple way to deal with it - flow with it. You can't prevent what's going to happen, people always tend to adopt the lingua franca of a region and teach it to their children, replacing their native languages. It's happened to me, I hardly speak Urdu, my native language. English is the language i think and speak in. People consider speaking in a lingua franca as having financial advantages. So, eventually, the lingua franca will prevail.

You don't think modern communication will stop the fragmentation process at some point?

I have considered it, and my answer is in the negative. Internet language, hip-hop talk, TyPiNg LiK dIs, etc. I think the English language is fragmenting faster than ever before. It's going to fragment much later in the subcontinent though, IMO. I believe the fragmentation process began recently in the US & surrounding areas, and a century or so earlier in the UK. Like...Scots is it's own "leid". It's be so for over three centuries.

hmn. .

I don't think it's fair to put the languistic change of the past few centuries in the same category as the languistic change of the past twenty years. . . too much has changed by way of mass media.

Speaking of which. .

I'm not saying there won't be dialects, but of the ones you listed, the only modern variant that's primary usage for anyone--hip hop talk, as you call it--is only in true primary usage among a very small group, primarily individuals who will never have much discourse with mainstream cultures. I have no numbers for this, but I'd bet that while use of hip hop language as slang is up, it's usage as a primary or only means of communication is down.

Thoughts?

The linguistic change may have occurred centuries ago, but in the same island. You'd expect advances in communication to have merged the two languages together again, radio's been in the UK for almost a century now, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. I need to listen carefully when watching someone speak in Scots on TV.

I think the future of English lies with people who use it as a second language. English has adopted so many foreign words in the past century. I think communication has only slowed the process of fragmentation, while influencing many new loan words. I could be wrong, time will tell. I think every language has an end, either via assimilation, fragmentation, or extinction. English is, after all, a fragmented piece of Old Saxon.

I don't think "merging back together" is how things streamline-- I think streamlining happens when small languages die, as many have been doing of late.

I do agree with you about ESL, though.

I don't think Internet language will necessarily speed up the fragmentation of English. If anything, it may slow it down due to the fact that English is the most-used language on the Internet, so it's used as a standard for many. TyPinG lIk DiS and l33t sp3ak aren't (usually) spoken so it's unlikely that they'll catch on outside certain circles on the Internet.

I do agree with you that it's the second-language speakers who now hold the most sway over the future of the English language. In 1,000 years time, it will probably have split into numerous dialects, even separate languages, but English shows no signs of dying.

I hope that indigenous languages can be kept alive. Telugu is one of the most widely spoken Dravidian languages (I believe) so it would be a great shame to lose it. But a language can only be kept alive if its use is encouraged, it's taught at a young age, and if it can actually be used. Telugu needs to be taught to children at a very early age, preferably before English, for it to have any decent chance of surviving. This doesn't just go for Telugu - it applies to pretty much any language that isn't English.

Yes, but generally, middle class & rich people in India tend to teach English to their children before or with their native languages. In my case, my parents started teaching me Urdu, but switched to English upon the advice of my kindergarten teacher.

I don't think Telugu will be dead even in 1000 years, but the number of speakers will surely go down. I have quite a few Telugu acquaintances who hardly speak the language. However, the main reason the government has taken this step by notifying shopkeepers is not to spread education of the language, it's to de-Islamicise the city. My city, Hyderabad, is the capital of Andhra Pradesh, and is the centre of the Dakhini dialect of Urdu. The old city is covered with Urdu almost everywhere. But in the new city, where I live, there's virtually no Urdu, everything is in English, with some Telugu. I don't know what others may think, but I personally find the Dravidian languages to have horrible alphabets, they're not a good sight for my eyes, main reason I refused to learn any Dravidian language. To see Telugu plastered everywhere in this city that was once compared to Orleans a century back, the thought itself is depressing.

The question here is not the survival of Telugu, but the survival of Dakhini Urdu.

Actually, the recent flood of immigrants into the US has fractured English even further. It's not uncommon for Latinos to speak a hybrid of Spanish and English rather than just Spanish. Most didn't speak standard Spanish that well in the first place, but spoke a dialect. Hip hop talk, aka Ebonics or Black English, is a recent (last 100 years) development. Ebonics is breaking off steadily from standard English and will probably be a separate language within a century or two. Other immigrant subgroups speak a mix of English and their native tongue.

This is historically not a new phenomenon-the Jewish communities of Europe once had separate languages that were mixtures of Hebrew and the gentile tongue. Yiddish (Hebrew-German) is the best known, but there were several other hybrid languages, including a Hebrew-Spanish, sometimes called Ladino. Today in the West African nation of Cameroon, a mix of French and English, called Frananglais, is quickly becoming the standard. Then there's languages which evolved away from main tongues, such as Haitian Creole, which came from French, and the pidgin Englishes of Polynesia, as well as Afrikaans, which emerged within two centuries of Dutch colonialization of South Africa.

I think that the US may well fracture into separate nations based on linguistics and ethnicities within 50 years. An attempt was made by Brigham Young to create a "Mormon alphabet", sometimes called Deseret Alphabet, in the 1850s in order to control what his flock could read, but it failed. The Cherokee Indians in the US have their own alphabet, invented by a Cherokee named Sequoia in just 10 years, a remarkable achievement. Probably the most successful artificial alphabet in history is Cyrillic, used in Eastern Europe. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody invented an Ebonics or Spanglish alphabet. What would be really interesting is to see Chinese characters or something like them grafted onto English.

Another possibility is the phoneticization of English, so that "tough" would become "tuff". This has already happened to an extent in American advertising, with words like "rite" and "lite" making their way into product names. There's even a drugstore chain called Rite Aid. Acronyms have become words before, such as "Nasdaq" (an alternative US stock exchange, which started in 1971 as the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation system) and "Conoco" (Continental Oil Company). The word "snafu" was an acronym. So was "radar".

Language is changing all the time. Some languages die, others are born. I personally think that efforts to save Telugu or whatever it is are doomed; Indians would rather speak English or Hindi (India's official language) than a regional language. Africans have demonstrated a preference for speaking colonial tongues, usually French or English, over tribal languages. Efforts to make Swahili into a pan-African language, spearheaded largely by blacks in America, have flopped. I think that English words will make their way into Mandarin Chinese eventually, what with hundreds of millions of Chinese using English regularly.

Among the few whites remaining in the US, formerly verboten words like damn and s*it and f*ck will become part of everyday language. This is already the case in Australia from what I've heard, it's scarcely considered swearing now. Ebonic and Spanish words will make their way into the language. It's possible that as the white community separates from one another and clusters together in isolated enclaves that they'll evolve new languages. I'm reminded of the three Austrian girls who were locked in a room for seven years; by the time they were freed, they could no longer speak German, they spoke a distinct new language. That's how fast language can change.

um..those last 3 are actually some of the oldest Anglo-Saxon works out there (c'eptin f**k, which has Germanic roots...

there's still actually a majority of honkies in the US out there, though smaller by the year...
It's very hard to predict what language will do. Actually, Ebonics (which, strangely enough, has a sort of Hispanic grammar to it, go figure) is being accepted by mainstream population, and you'll hear a lot of suburban kids learning inner-city rap and hiphop stuff. It's a sort of cross-pollination.

Examples of this are rife throughout history. Two centuries after the Norman Conquest, the French needed 'translators' to understand the English 'French'...and a few years ago in Miami, I heard a radio report of how Latinos there had to go to school to learn 'real' Spanish (It's almuerzo for lunch, not lonche don't be a cheapescato...

Now that 'American' Indians (expats, returning to India) acre coming back, expect further cross-pollination... Surprisingly, the only people that have have an institute to keep their language 'pure', are the French...

Interesting discussion.

IMO as English becomes people's primary language in places like India the local dialect will start to strongly diverge from Standard English as it picks up lexical and grammatical elements from the lingustic substratum, that is, the old languages. People will be diglossic, that is, they will switch back and forth between standard English and the local dialect depending on the situation. In this way a few hundred years from now Standard English will become a petrified "classical" language, similar to how Classical Latin was in relation to the various Vulgar Latin dialects in the later Roman Empire, while the various English dialects go their separate ways. And like with Vulgar Latin, the English dialects will eventually become separate languages.

Ebonics is a very fascinating dialect, it has some very interesting grammatical features.