CRYSTAL IN CALCUTTA

If scholarship were essentially associated with serious boring theories and incomprehensible terminologies puckered brows, then David Crystal could not qualify as a scholar. For he is refreshingly different from everything dull and lacklustre that is usually linked with knowledge. In his one and half hour talk at the banquette hall at Park, on “the future of Englishes” he actually entertained his audience with his unmatched sense of humour along with his erudition. He explained the concept of “Englishes” as opposed to “English” with a story of what happened at a similar conference where the title was mistakenly written as “the future of English”. When he approached the hotel manager saying that the ending is missing, the manager hit his panic button running all over and even announcing in the mic “we have lost David Crystal’s ending!!!”… the tale ends happily, however, when they did find his ending “in a waste paper box”. In a similar fashion he explained the importance of understanding a culture for proper understanding of a language. “ How many of you would understand the allusion when I say: — BCL reaches the part where no other institution reaches?” very few did. The allusion was that of a catchy beer advertisement “Heineken beer refreshes the part where no other beer reaches” he narrates the popularity of the advertisement and the subsequent puns used of the same such as “Heineken beer reaches the pirate (as in the context of Longfellow who gets two wooden legs instead of a fractured one, two crutches instead of a broken one and a vulture instead of a dying parrot after drinking the beer), … reaches the pilot (who flies his plane to safety after doing the same),…. the parrot, …. the poet etc”With an adequate amount of statistics he showed that taking account of the various degree of fluency of English speakers around the world, for every one native speaker on English, there is three non native speakers and the number of English speakers residing in India is larger than the English native speakers in UK and USA combined. Which is quite an extraordinary situation. However, in the past, around 1600 or so the situation was quite different. The use of English was restricted and even in UK in places like Welsh and Ireland English was not used. And people learned French and Latin to secure better jobs. But then the scenario changed. The laymen came up with“because it is the most beautiful language in the world!” “the most logical one!” “ it has no grammar!” and other similarly silly reasoning. In Crystal’s words “if I were the god of language looking down upon the world trying to choose a world language English would not be it”But English spread for four reasonsi) political powerii) power of knowledge (85% of scientific publishing is made in Englishiii) economic power (money talks and it speaks English in today’s world)iv) cultural power (in the broadest sense of the term, radio, tv, big film industries)Countries like Nigeria tried to get out of their colonial past and so away English but could not choose one of the 450 languages available to them without resorting to communal violence. So they thought “better the devil you know” after all “everybody will hate it equally”. On the positive side with the adoption came the adaptation. There is now one Nigerian English. English being the vacuum cleaner of a language sucked in words and accents from languages that adopted it. Come to think of it, vocabulary-wise it is less a Germanic language more a Romance one. The French complaining about the intrusion of English words in their language should not do so since they came to English from French in the first place. Therefore the englishes are going from strength to strength with more and more literature being written in many of them. The “correct” usage has become contextualised. Crystal points our that even the concept of “correct” spelling was not so important and issue till 18th century when newspaper and other publications came in highlights. In present day, 2% of speakers of English speak the standard and they “learn” it. Crystal leant ‘Liverpool’ English when he was 10 because his parents moved to Liverpool and the older boys, who did not like his Welsh accent, threatend him with dire consequences if he did not, and then “learned” standard English to get a job. But, he says, he still has these three distinct englishes in his head. While the force of intelligibility maintained the standard languageThe force of identity induces the formation of non-standard onesNow the entire world is at least bi or tri dialectal and people in countries like India are multilingual. And human beings can handle multilingual situations with ease. “ we love languages”, Crystal proposes a modification on Chomsky’s LAD (language acquisition device). He says we are born with MAD (multilingual acquisition device) “babies are born with language scanners”. Proper monolinguals are poor minorities in the present day world. And in the multilingual world English is not going to maintain its singular identity, neither is it desirable. Days of native speaker prominence is a thing of the pastIn his first visit to India, something he is planning for the “last 63 years”, Crystal mesmerised the audience with his delightful combination of wit and wisdom