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Does india speak english

While English is not the official language of India, it has become the language of the ruling elite. Fluency in English is extremely sought after and brings with it the potential for social mobility to the underprivileged sections of society. But is an English-medium education the solution? The United Nations celebrates English Language Day on 23 April, the date traditionally observed as both the birthday and date of death of William Shakespeare. In the Indian context, the English language had been recognised for official purposes in the Constitution for a period of 15 years and continues to enjoy such recognition under the Official Languages Act, But in a country with 22 scheduled languages those that are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and 99 other non-scheduled languages as per the Census , what role does English play?

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While English is not the official language of India, it has become the language of the ruling elite. Fluency in English is extremely sought after and brings with it the potential for social mobility to the underprivileged sections of society.

But is an English-medium education the solution? The United Nations celebrates English Language Day on 23 April, the date traditionally observed as both the birthday and date of death of William Shakespeare.

In the Indian context, the English language had been recognised for official purposes in the Constitution for a period of 15 years and continues to enjoy such recognition under the Official Languages Act, But in a country with 22 scheduled languages those that are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and 99 other non-scheduled languages as per the Census , what role does English play?

Why is English becoming increasingly sought after as a medium of instruction? And what impact does the English medium have on education in the country? This reading list explores the contours of multilingualism in India in the context of English language education. English is often understood in India as the language of colonial British rule, but does its use in postcolonial India bear the legacy of colonialism?

Tejaswini Niranjana wrote :. As the historian Ranajit Guha suggests, English did not owe its importance as "an emblem of power" within the education system to official sponsorship alone.

English becomes a mark of status through a complex production of the colonial subject within multiple discourses and on multiple sites. This association of the English language with power and status has continued in postcolonial India.

Gyanendra Pandey observed :. In the South Asian subcontinent David Faust and Richa Nagar explained this concentration of power in the hands of English speakers:.

In much of urban India, there prevail two systems of education—English-medium and vernacular-medium. On an individual level, English-medium education has been a ticket to vertical mobility in Indian society.

At the societal level, English-medium education has played a critical role in producing what Kothari calls a modernised techno managerial elite that continues to have disproportionate influence in shaping the discursive terrain of development, and thereby policies and programmes that affect the social fabric of the country.

Less visibly, English-medium education widens social fractures in Indian society by creating and reinforcing a social, cultural, economic, and discursive divide between the English-educated and the majority. Further, there is resistance to the mainstreaming of English language education by the ruling Brahmanical elite in the country in the name of protection of regional languages. Yet, the hypocrisy in such resistance is self-evident.

Placing the onus of protecting the mother tongue on the marginalised groups is another tool of marginalisation in the hands of the dominant groups. After ascending to power, Reddy is, in fact, honouring his poll promise of English-medium schools despite mounting criticism from the opposition and a section of the society which fears the loss of identity and culture due to this move. Countering their criticism, he asked his critics to introspect as to whether they send their children and grandchildren to English- or Telugu-medium schools Indian Express Most of the critics are from privileged backgrounds, and send their children to English-medium private schools.

Their argument is that the introduction of English-medium schools will prove to be an onslaught on Telugu language and culture.

However, it is surprising that they expect only the marginalised to take the responsibility of protecting culture and tradition while the rich continue to enjoy the fruits of modernity riding on quality education in English. Peggy Mohan also wrote :. It is not surprising, then, that the poor have taken note of our success and decided to follow us up the food chain into the privileged world of English.

While they may know that they are abandoning their heritage by putting their children early into English-medium private schools, they are sanguine about this, choosing to survive in the present milieu than being reluctant custodians of local languages that have given them precious little in terms of livelihood. It does not find a place in the scheduled languages list. Instead, Hindi is recognised as the official language of the nation and Article of the Constitution, and Sanskrit is given primacy when it comes to providing the vocabulary for Hindi.

The mention of English in this constitutional scheme is characterised by its temporary nature since Article provides for its continuance in use for only 15 years.

However good, however important, English may be, we cannot tolerate that there should be an English-knowing elite and a large mass of our people not knowing English.

Therefore, we must have our own language. Well, English today is far more important in the world than it was when the British came here. It is undoubtedly today the nearest approach to an international language. S Anand explained the unique position of English in Indian society, as compared to a language like Sanskrit, which has been historically inaccessible to Dalits.

Unlike Sanskrit, there are no scriptural injunctions against the learning of English; English is theoretically as accessible to dalits and women as it is to the 'dwijas'. However, the brahmanical classes have monopolised the use of English as also other symbols of western modernity and have justified the denial of the same to the dalits.

Education in Hindi or a scheduled language is also fraught with sanskritisation and does not hold the same emancipatory potential as English. According to Anand,. The point here is not whether dalit bahujans all over the country are using English to assert their position today. They are of course doing this in languages they are comfortable in. Similarly, Babu wrote :. Rather, they represent two different elites. Historically, English has been the preserve of the elite and privileged in India.

It is a well-known fact that the first people to benefit from English education in India were the privileged and elites, who could send their children to English-medium schools and accumulate cultural capital over time. One needs to note that it is not only English as a language of instruction but the way it is spoken accent that creates a hierarchy in the society and allows the privileged to garner immense cultural capital Bourdieu and Passeron to be used for social mobility.

The same has also been true in a global set-up since the advent of liberalisation in the s. Faust and Nagar explained :. Under the liberalising trade regime, the elite see their futures as tied to the global economy and increasingly detached from the future of the common people.

In fact, some of the people we interviewed in linked a steadily increasing dominance of English with the restructuring of the global and national economies, and the globalisation of culture in which the English speaking national elite benefit from transnational capitalism while the ordinary people are left out. The unfair social and economic disadvantage faced by non-English speakers is the reason for the widespread appeal of the language among the public.

This was exacerbated due to the emerging opportunities presented by a globalised economy. Tanuka Endow traced the growing demand for English language education and especially English-medium education to the boom in the services sector.

English as a medium of instruction gained importance in India as economic benefits of education through this medium became evident Daswani While these professionals were helped by tertiary education, even jobs with lower levels of educational requirement these days often need some knowledge of English. An EPW editorial made a similar observation regarding the renewed demand for English language education among sections of the Indian public due to the proliferation of jobs in the business process outsourcing BPO and information technology-enabled services ITeS sector in the early s.

There can be little doubt that knowledge of English is a prerequisite for obtaining a skilled job in the globalising economy. Thanks to US dominance of the global economy, English has become the language of world business. People around the world are learning English, in China, in Russia, in Korea and in Latin America besides in the nations that were colonised by the British. There can be no quarrel with the desirability of learning English.

The BPO boom lays stress on not just learning English in the traditional manner but on mastering English speech and the different idioms of the language. This is not to say that there is any underlying reason for English and high-paying jobs to necessarily go hand in hand. Peggy Mohan noted :. It is not that good jobs intrinsically require English.

It is just that English serves the purpose of a gatekeeper, as it were. It is a convenient job requirement that ensures that the best jobs in the country stay with the children of the elite. While the middle class have benefited from exposure to English over the years, many marginalised sections of the public continued to be cut off from education in the language and the mobility it presents.

Noting the extent of aspiration for an English language education in India, Dey wrote :. Anyone interacting with the people at the grassroots level knows that the marginalised communities want their children to learn English so as to have a level playing field in the contemporary competitive world.

A large number of poor aspiring families is unable to admit their children private English-medium schools through reservation and also cannot afford quality English education due to the lack of financial resources. Endow highlighted :. However, the ground situation presents a contrast. A study conducted in government schools at the primary level in seven Indian states found that Classes 1 and 2 textbooks focus less on listening and speaking skills, and more on developing reading and writing skills NCERT Sanskrit is being offered at all levels of school and higher education as an important option.

Commenting on this language policy, Yemuna Sunny wrote :. The reason for the mass departure of the elite from government schools is often attributed to the fact that these were not able to offer English-medium education, and this, many believe, has led to the deterioration of government schools. As the elite deserted government schools in favour of expensive private English-medium schools, government schools have ended up as the only option for the poor. With the falling educational standards in government schools and a consequent rise in aspirational levels of the poor, poorly-equipped private and unrecognised English-medium schools have begun to mushroom across the country.

Therefore, there has been an increase in the migration of students from government to private English-medium schools at the elementary level in the last two decades after the s Mukhopadhyay and Sarangapani As a result, an unchecked private educational market, without any government monitoring and quality assessment, has become the norm across the country.

In the absence of availability of English-medium education in government schools, the unmet aspirations of the public of providing such an education to their children is met by low-cost private education. Endow explained :. Among many such private schools which charge low fees,2 or the low-cost private schools LCPS , a marketing strategy to attract students is to advertise the medium of instruction as English.

While fluency in English is highly sought after, a divisive question is whether instruction in the English medium is suitable for achieving this end or not. We have seen that imparting education at the primary level through an unfamiliar language poses barriers for children attending English medium LCPS, and does not develop their agency in using English for communication. While reading ability was demonstrated to be good, the comprehension, be it in terms of simple words, sentences or passages from textbooks, was quite poor.

Their agency in using English on their own was revealed to be extremely limited. She also noted that learning deficits remained hidden through successive grades due to translation- and memorisation-based teaching processes, and inadequate competence of teachers. Mohan attributed the struggles of EWS children studying in English-medium schools to the diglossia that afflicts Indian society, contrasting it with bilingualism common in many other countries. Extending the concept of diglossia to the mixture seen in urban India where English shares space with local Indian languages and dialects, Mohan wrote :.

Despite similarities between foreign children and middle-class Indian children at the beginning, a major difference between them is that the foreign children later end up bilingual. Their home language is stable, and they are expected to maintain it alongside English and ultimately do essentially the same things in both languages. She explained why this diglossia can be extremely challenging for EWS children in private schools.

What is needed is not just the daily contact with the teacher in class, but friendships outside the classroom, something more akin to the relationships that set up their first language.


It's time to challenge the notion that there is only one way to speak English

There is a widely held belief that there are sizeable economic returns to English-language skills in India. This column seeks to estimate the wage returns to English skills in India. But the effects vary. Returns are higher for older and more educated workers and lower for less educated, younger workers, suggesting that the complementarity between English skills and education appears to have strengthened over time. India is a linguistically diverse country - it has thousands of languages, of which have over 10, native speakers Census , with English being 44 th on the list of languages in India in terms of the number of speakers. One in five Indian adults can speak English. Same is true for those belonging to so called higher castes, urban residents, and younger and better educated population.

About % ( million) inhabitants of India speak English making it the world's second largest English speaking nation. Fairly large number isn't it but.

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Philip Reeves. India is a country of a billion people, and two official languages. Hindi and English are designated as the languages of government. This situation has led to the spontaneous creation of "Hinglish," a hybrid language combining elements of Hindi and English. Now you may be familiar with Spanglish, that American blend of Spanish and English. Here's another language that you may hear more often as India becomes a more important power. That giant nation has two official languages: Hindi and English. And many Indians have combined these two to make something called Hinglish. Unidentified Woman: Speaking foreign language. Good afternoon.

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does india speak english

Illustration by Zemir Bermeo. For years, classifying the languages spoken in India has been a very complicated task since experts have to differentiate between dialects and mother tongues that share many similarities. A census conducted in showed that India has about 19, languages and dialects, of which almost 1, are considered dialects and only are recognized as languages the acceptance criterion being that the language has 10, or more speakers. The languages spoken in India belong mainly to two big linguistic families: the Indo-European and the Dravidian; others come mainly from the Austro-Asian and Tibetan-Burman linguistic families. Tamil and Sanskrit considered by some academics as a lingua franca in India are the only two official classical languages.

Some good friends of mine from India were watching TV in their apartment in Toledo, Ohio when a repairman came to fix something. They talked to him periodically while he was working, and after a while, he asked them how long they had been in the United States.

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With more than 1. It also boasts the seventh-highest landmass with 1. The Census of India of recognizes major languages and other languages spoken in the country. Contrary to the popular belief, India has no national language as the Constitution of the country does not grant this title to any language spoken in the country. Several other languages have official status at the state level.

The most spoken languages in the world

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Most of North India speaks Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, sounds that do not exist in English and are difficult for native English.

Did you know? English is the official language in these five countries

English should continue to be the official language of India. English is used as the official language in India. If it continues there will be no personal or rather say national identity of India.

Which countries are best at English as a second language?

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Nearly one in 10 people in England and Wales - 8 per cent - reported speaking a different main language to English or Welsh in the census, findings from the Office for National Statistics ONS have shown. Punjabi is the third-most spoken language across the country, with , speakers, mainly in the West Midlands, where it is the second-most spoken language. The list also includes other Indian languages with Urdu in fourth place, spoken by , people, followed by Bengali , , Gujarati , and Tamil as well. Polish is the second-most commonly reported main language with , speakers, reflecting more than half a million Poles who migrated to England and Wales during the last decade. Redcar and Cleveland local authority had the highest percentage of people with English as their main language at 99 per cent of the population, with Ealing listing the highest proportion of Polish speakers.

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But be forewarned that even places where English is the official or even just the primary language may not use the same words, phrases or spellings. Even Canadian words and phrases and British words and phrases may stump American visitors. SmarterTravel has put together a list of five countries where English is the official language. Some may surprise you — and there are also places that speak primarily English that don't designate it as an official language. Belize is the only English-language-official country in Central America.

Source: Wikipedia. What are idioms? And how can idioms help you become a fluent speaker?




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