Our Kannada kichdi

Our Kannada kichdi
Are too many Kannada words falling into disuse, as city dudes effortlessly substitute them with English ones, asks BAGESHREE S. on the occasion of Kannada Rajyotsava today
The Hindu


That sure is a `Howz you?' and not `Hegidya?'

YOU'RE IN an auto and have an instruction for the auto driver every now and then: "Right turn", "Left thogoli", "Straight hogi", "Slow maadi", "Stop, stop!"...

When was the last time you, instead, said: "Balagade thirgi", "Edagade thogoli", "Nera hogi", "Nidhana maadi", "Nilsi"?

Jog your memory one more time and think of the last time you used the Kannada equivalent for any of the following words: busy, easy, adjust, cheap, word, common, road, bottle, idea, use, public... For that matter, do you any longer read a number or identify a colour in Kannada?

Clearly, the "pure Kannadiga" (as many proudly call themselves!) lingo in Bangalore is so full of English that even the plays of T.P. Kailasam, which are parodies in a kichdi of English and Kannada, would now sound realistic. A line such as "Yeni garden-nu bahala silly, nodalu not a rose or lily, waste of timeu walking illi..." could well be what you say in everyday conversation. You might even substitute "bahala" with `too much"!

Easy English

Ask Kavya C., who's training to be a Montessori teacher, and she'll tell you more about using generous proportions of English in what are supposedly conversations in Kannada. "The English word is what's on the tip of my tongue. If I want to say someone is a `hypocrite' or pick a quarrel with my mom for being `stubborn' I unselfconsciously use the English words themselves," she says. "Actually, if you suddenly ask me what the Kannada word for `adjust' is, I won't be able to tell you." Not that she doesn't know the word, but it's not immediately accessible. She is forced to yank it out of the dark corners of her memory, though, when she visits her grandmom in a village near Tumkur.

Kavya reasons that her education in English medium and an overall English atmosphere makes her language what it is. "Even when the conversation is in Kannada, it is most often with people who know English also," she says.

S.Y. Vinay has reached the same linguistic destination, interestingly, by a route in the reverse. Vinay migrated to Bangalore from Shimoga after landing a job in a pharmaceutical firm and his language has seen a sea change since then. His "thumba kelsa", "rasthe" and "seese" have been replaced by "busy", "road" and "bottle" without him even noticing. "This kind of mixing becomes important for basic communication in a cosmopolitan context where the other person's knowledge of the language can't be taken for granted," he says. Sticking to his Shimoga-style Kannada would even seem "ridiculous" or "theatrical" in Bangalore. "Or people might mistake me for a flag bearer of the Kannada cause!"

Using plenty of English with Kannada (second best to speaking in English itself) becomes a marker of sophistication too. "I also said fewer `sorry's, `thank you's and `excuse me's back in my hometown," he points out. Curiously, these expressions, so natural to English, would sound extremely theatrical if translated and used in everyday Kannada conversations!

How do we approach this process of generous borrowing so "natural" in a metropolis? Do we fret over "adulteration" or do we accept it as the natural process of evolution of a language? After all, English itself is embracing words from other languages on an everyday basis and is the richer for it. Kannada too has always borrowed from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Marathi, Parsi, Arabic, and so on at various points. Eravalu Padakosha, a dictionary of loan words that have been naturalised in Kannada, edited by G. Venkatasubbiah, runs to 250 pages and it does not include words of Sanskrit and Prakrit origin. In his work Bhasheya Suttamutta, well-known linguist K.V. Narayan argues that the process of adopting foreign words ("nudi berake" as he calls it) has historically been a survival tactic for all languages.

But is there a point beyond which the language that borrows gets into a debt trap with no escape routes other than death? After all it's one thing to welcome the word "computer" into Kannada because it's a new concept and another to start using "word" and "stop" to the point of forgetting that we have words such as "pada" and "nillu".

For Basavaraj Kalgudi, literary critic and Director of Bangalore University Prasaranga, the question is far more complicated than that. "After all, there was a time when people worried about the use of the word `school' in Kannada. But `schoolu' is now a nativised word." There is an upper middle-class that entirely gives up its own language to embrace English. But there is also a "vibrant middle-class" that borrows several nouns and creatively uses them. This has happened especially with words that are markers of modernity, such as "school".

What is worrying, however, is the increasing loss of a "social context" for the use of Kannada in a world overwhelmed by the all-powerful English.

When the crucial realms of education, employment and social mobility are governed by English, what's at hand is not just a threat to the language, but a larger economic crisis and increasing class divide. This, says Dr. Kalgudi, is the predicament of all desi tongues.

"I actually wonder if many of our desi languages would survive beyond a few generations, specially as written modes of expressions," says Dr. Kalgudi. So, our languages might become "hittala bhashes" or "languages of the backyard" as U.R. Ananthamurthy once put it.

Combo lingo

For Chitra B.N., Manager-Training in a call centre, the emergence of the English-Kannada combo language itself is symptomatic of this process. She says that this peculiar lingo is born when the influence of English and the necessity of using it come face to face with the wish not to altogether forget one's mother tongue.

If this sounds unduly alarmist, Dr. Kalgudi offers an example. When a local bookshop held a creative writing contest for Bangalore school children in both Kannada and English, there were 500-odd entries in English and some two or three in Kannada. "So, all those who wrote in Kannada had to be given prizes!" says Dr. Kalgudi.

It is surely no coincidence that even while creative expressions in local languages get impoverished, creativity in English is fed by talents from former colonies!