Did you know that English may be the most spoken language on the planet at 1,132 million speakers. But it has 753 million non-native speakers compared to only 379 million native speakers¹. In simple terms, for every native English speaker, there are two non-native speakers of English for whom English is not their primary language. 

Yet, it has become the default universal language of today in international business, tourism, science, technology, and more. Interestingly, an English speaker can access nearly 60% of everything published on the web. Compare this with just over 1% of the Mandarin content available on the web which has over 1117 million speakers². The situation is worse in Hindi which accounts for only 0.04% of all Internet but has over 615 million speakers.

One could conclude that this is just language racism of a digital kind.

But this article is not about bashing English. (Now that would be an irony, considering this article is written in English)

This article is about learning. Learning life skills like tying a shoelace, learning social skills like making friends, learning stuff to make a career on like biochemistry, learning the art of enquiry into larger issues like the purpose of this human life etc. You know, learning in the largest sense of the word.

Broadly speaking, there are three schools of thought on how humans learn. They are the behavioral school, the humanistic school, and the cognitive school. If one does not ‘sweat’ the details, it can be inferred that the behavioral school does not depend on language for learning. Instead, it learns by observation, trial, and error. The humanistic school believes that you learn best in your mother tongue, your native language, the language you prefer to speak at home with your family. The cognitive school proposes that you learn best when you interact with others in a universal language (read English). 

But then, this is India. For every axiom, there is an equally compelling exception. 

In India, English is A Good Thing to Have. It is a matter of pride for vernacular parents. It is a skill with immense market value. And, most importantly, it is the currency of aspiration. It is not a language; it is the promise of social mobility and individual progress. Indians wish to both claim English and reject it as a marker of class and authority³.

So much so that villagers worship a Goddess of English in Banka village in Uttar Pradesh as a symbol of Dalit renaissance, to help them climb up the social and economic ladder⁴.

Naturally, with such emotional projection, there is no one English in the country. Every local Indian language has colluded with English to form its own metamorphosed language. At its simplest, this can be observed in Hinglish, a strange and copulated form of Hindi and English, combined to make perfect sense to the sender and the receiver of the communication. 

Snigdha Poonam, in her 2018 book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, has called “cut-price English” — functional English phrases remixed in local idiom taught in low-cost English schools for those deprived of expensive formal education.

Now, in a bizarre case of volte face, the very Victorian Oxford dictionary has included words like Aadhaar, Dabba, and Shaadi in its lexicon⁵. (Fun times, scrabble players?)

Hence, it would not be erroneous to say that there is English; and then there is ‘Inglish’.

Why is this important?

For most Indians, learning in English is forced, awkward, stilted, and pompous. But learning in Inglish is altogether another matter. It is colloquial, informal, and vernacular. It is like learning from a close friend rather than a stern foreigner.

For the Tamilians among us, it is the difference between rasam and mulligatawny soup. It may be the same, but the resonance of its meanings is a world apart.

This was also corroborated as a key finding in a qualitative study conducted by Shramy Learning Technologies over a 6-week period in November / December 2021.  This exploratory study was conducted to understand the mismatch between the Indian working professionals upskilling needs and the EdTech industry’s current offerings.

One of the key findings of this study was the need for less of the foreign and more of the local. While all the respondents were used to learning in English, most also felt that their learning could be faster if the medium of instruction was more colloquial and local. Beyond the language, this theme was also conceptual. The respondents desired for illustrations that were rooted in India with examples from the local culture that were understood instinctively rather than synthetically.

That is why, at Shramy, we have signed an implicit contract – never to use big words when small words will suffice, never to use jargon when it can be explained simply, and never to let language be an impediment to learning.

After all, true learning should not be held hostage in the Tower of England⁶.

Bibliography

1. https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world
2. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-most-used-languages-on-the-internet/
3. https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-read-english-in-india/
4. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12355740
5. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/oxford-dictionary-gets-26-india-english-words-like-aadhaar-dabba-hartal-shaadi-2169190
6. https://www.livescience.com/42821-tower-of-london.html