Friday, March 18, 2011

The language that used to be called English

Last night, I received a ‘text’ from friend which read: i m gd. hw hv u bn? lng tm! wna cth p smtm? trng 2 gt in tch fr a whl nw. gv m a bz n lts tk. wt sy n hwr thngs newyz?
It took me almost 15 minutes to figure the damned thing out. What it turned out to be was: I am good. How have you been? Long time! Want to catch up sometime? Trying to get in touch for a while now. Give me a buzz and let’s talk. What say, and how are things anyway?

Clearly, with such a complicated dialect of English that has emerged over the past few years, the need for cryptic codes has diminished rapidly. Funnily enough, this dialect is neither recognized officially nor taught in school. So how does it still manage to be propagated so widely? Here are a few reasons:

TEXTing: Also called SMSing, which is again, short for Short Messaging Service. Every ‘text’ is charged per character and so, understandably, conjunctions (one of the eight parts of speech) and vowels (A…E…I…O…U, for those who do not remember them, thanks to too much TEXTing) are wiped clean from every ‘text’ to try and pack in as much information as possible, within the permitted 160 odd characters. It’s like a telegram. Except that it mutilates the language beyond recognition. The end result reads like the ‘text’ above. The race to conserve characters leaves English looking pretty characterless. Pun unintended.

The solution: Someone needs to send these policy makers back to school to get their language and grammar right. They need to be given a Wren and Martin as a standard issue perhaps.

Uncle Sam: English was supposed to be, for quite some time, a language Great Britain had a monopoly on. Those were the days when English was pure. And sweet. It had complete spellings, a clearly defined pronunciation guide, unambiguous grammar and all the parts of speech intact. Then, sometime in the mid 20th century, a new kind of colonization emerged. Linguistic colonization. Led by the notorious Uncle Sam, it was nothing short of a jihad or a crusade. There was a systematic elimination of pillars that bolstered the language. Z replaced S, so organiSation became organiZation and realiSe became realiZe. Letters we needlessly butchered and as a result coloUr became COLOR, judgEment turned into JUDGMENT. Z came to be pronounced as ZEE and computers started to sound like COMPUDRS. Even worse route (pronounced ROOT) became route (ROUT, which, in British English, has an entirely different meaning) and Iran became I-RAN (sometimes I really feel like asking Uncle Sam: where the hell did you run?). To ensure complete efficacy of this “Final Solution of the English question”, softwares like Microsoft Word began to set their default language to ‘English (U.S.)’ and promptly displayed a red line under the word when you typed the conventionally correct spellings. Talk about annihilation!

The solution (not to be confused with “Final Solution of the English question”): To begin with, set the default language to English (U.K.). So what if the software is from Uncle Sam’s land? It doesn’t mean we bow down to linguistic tyranny. Next, get the pronunciations right. ROUT to ROOT. ZEE to Z. I-RAN to IRAN. Third, if you can, go and bonk Uncle Sam on the head. Really hard.

KPO a.k.a. Knowledge Processing and Outsourcing: I am still a little hazy on the exact difference between a KPO and a BPO but one thing I know for sure is that whatever they process, it is definitely not knowledge. I mean, come on, there used to be a time when graduation was known to be the basic level of qualification one had to achieve in order to live a decent and comfortable life. Needless to say, since the benchmark of education was much higher, so was the knowledge of languages and their understanding. Then came the outsourcing boom. A boom that blew everything to smithereens. Another covert attempt at colonisation by Uncle Sam. Kids barely out of their teens, with an incomplete education, were being offered plum jobs; their pronunciation was being forcibly altered to suit Uncle Sam’s needs. Obviously, is kids of an impressionable age were offered such high paying distractions, they were bound to fumble!

The solution: If you have siblings, kids, nephews, nieces or any other relatives in that age group, deter them from the KPO life. Tell them KPO is a misnomer! Attack the root of the problem.

Sure there must be more reasons, and you’re welcome to point them out, but off the cuff, these are the three that struck me. Sure, I may sound archaic when I say that the language used in ‘text’ messages are a little difficult for me to decipher but that is not because I am averse to adapting, I just refuse to sit back and accept the mutilation of a language that brings me my bread and butter. Nothing personal. I mean, to evolve is one thing and to wipe out is quite another. Besides, it is a global language and hence any change will affect communication around the globe.

Till we restore English to its former glory – let’s keep the torch burning and the protest alive. Long live the revolution.