Evolving "Vinglish"

A repertoire of ingenious words make this hybrid lingo, a dialect with a global reach.

A classmate at college was a quote-monger, spouting out whole poems and passages from textbooks to impress others. Once I challenged him at a meeting to recite two quotes from a Shakespeare play, using only five syllables in all. He said it was impossible. Prepared for this,  I cited ‘Hamlet’: “To be or not to be” and “Words, words, words.” “Oh, Shakespeare is full of quotations”, he retorted tartly, as if I had cheated. 

Since the film ‘English-Vinglish’ became a sensational award-winner, my wife and I have been collecting variations of this lingo by Indian speakers. A niece from Delhi told us that our ‘prepone’ had entered the Oxford dictionary. And ‘pone’, meaning ‘appointment’, was due for lexical approval. In homes and offices, we hear many ingenious and useful expressions of hybrid lingos, making Vinglish an authentic dialect with a global reach.

Languages live by absorbing words and idioms from other cultures.  The Queen’s English in the British Raj adopted many native terms like ‘jungle, bungalow, verandah, tiffin’, apart from noble concepts like ‘karma, avatar, yoga, dharma, pundit and guru’. True it also borrowed ‘loot’, ‘dacoit’, and ‘chhota peg’, apart from ‘Mr. 420’. ‘Dharna’ and ‘rasta roko’ are still alien, but we need no glossaries for our own mishaps, misdeeds and ‘akrama’. 

Changing lifestyles propagate new words and names for actions like ‘strap-hanging’, ‘missed call’ and ‘i-Phone’.  Some expressions are derived from sports, like ‘googly’ and ‘back-hand compliment’. Some are loan-words translated from our mother tongues, which use suffixes for emphasis like ‘adey’ in Kannada, ‘thaan’ in Tamil and ‘hee’ in Hindi: “Teacher only told” and “We are like that only”. This same need to affirm what we feel, leaves us free to say, “He came yesterday itself”. “Where all you went?  What all you did?”

We had a cook from Himachal Pradesh, a fan of Hindi films, who related with gusto the romance of the “hero and heroni”. He also gave us news that a young colleague had been blessed with “a baba and a baby”.

An aunt who preferred her morning coffee with the newspaper would fuss if the paper had not yet been “put” on the mat outside the door. She used to advise my wife to “keep the cooker” and “catch water”. We are, like the Chinese, highly sensitive to the idea of ‘saving face’, keeping up personal and community honour.  
“She did not know how to keep her face” is an idiom in Tamil heard when a matron is embarrassed in a group she belongs to. Socio-linguistics is recognised as a serious branch of social history, yielding insights into the changes in the psychology, customs and manners in different countries.

I end as I began, with a quote about language. “Words are wise men’s counters, we do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, an English thinker of the 17th century, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He meant that it was unwise to value sayings merely because the authors were famous or legendary. We must interpret words for ourselves, in the light of our own experience.