In defence of English

Sometimes, the attitude towards English by some professional Indians pains me. Though English is the language that earns them their daily bread, lets them travel and live around the world, and has opened up our country to the information age, there's a certain disdain towards it.

'I don't need to bother. After all, I can be understood.' Sadly though, the message is often obfuscated in a mess of mixed tenses and metaphors, and incorrect use of words. Of course, if the person's first language isn't English, and they're making a real effort, I have nothing but respect for that. But to hide behind the excuse of it being the language of our colonial masters, and therefore not something to pay too much attention to, is to me, just hypocritical.

I often participate in a certain Indian forum, where, given the number of IT professionals, doctors and engineers, the quality of English is rather depressing. It also makes posts very hard to read at times, and there is plenty of ambiguity too - we're not talking about small things like split infinitives and non-hyphenated compound adjectives here.

Recently, after a spate of seeing the word 'advise' in place of 'advice' (as in, 'He gave me some good advise', or even, 'He gave me some good advises') I posted a gentle thread pointing out the difference between the two words. Does this make me 'retentive'? Of course it does. But if somebody kept making a mistake with an engineering term, or made an error in some calculations, there would have been a quick correction.

And while my post started an interesting discussion, there's always somebody who decides that anyone who is concerned with the language is a 'grammar Nazi'. An engineer can correct somebody's physics without a problem, but a writer can't talk about grammar without being assumed to be smug and superior.

But surely language is something we must all care about. My wife, who used to work with Indian software engineers in the US, constantly came home with horror stories about engineers who just didn't believe that communication was a priority. Sometimes e-mails were so badly (and rudely) written that it was difficult to know what the person was saying.

Again, I should stress that I'm not talking about people for whom English is a second language and who are genuinely making an effort, but people who just don't want to know. Like the ones who have been in the mortgage industry for five years, and still pronounce the 't' in 'mortgage'. That's just a minor example of the things that all add up and have professional consequences.

As expected, a thread that was becoming quite a useful discussion was derailed by somebody who got defensive, though his English was excellent. He sounded quite upset, using strong words to describe us (pedantic and intolerant), and the tonal result of our words (derision and scorn).

It set me thinking about how, in spite of the fact that people believe they don't need to know English, knowing it well is perceived as superiority. It's a messy guilt-laden relationship, and it's true that a lot of middle-class people in India still bear colonial crosses. But English in India has long ceased to be a language of colonisers, and I don't believe we have any excuse for speaking it incorrectly or imprecisely.

Of course, if somebody gets upset, citing pedantry, every time we have a chance to learn from each other, we're not going to get anywhere. Language suffers from this attitude that imprecision is okay. But even the most flighty, poetic language, if done right, is precise. Poetic licence isn't, after all, a licence to kill.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.