There's Englishes and Englishes

Potateem

Dec 02, 2021

This week’s post got its inspiration from the fact that a friend and I just completed an edited volume yesterday – that we just turned in to the publisher. Hurrah. And the idea for the book stemmed from numerous conversations she and I had had over the past few years about the desperate need we see for English departments to change what they are doing, to change how English – both language and literature - is being taught. Why? Well because the world has changed drastically. Because there is not just one English anymore – and this has been the case for decades. And English literature is hardly just British and American literature, as I started talking about a few weeks ago.

But the focus, in English departments across the world, is still very much on the prestige varieties of English, and, therefore, on the English literatures emanating from those countries – namely traditional “native” speaker countries, specifically, the UK and the USA (oh, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are fine, too, just not held up quite as high). And even more specifically, white Britain and America. Because there’s nothing prestigious about non-white varieties of English, native or not.

And I think a reason for the perpetuation of the status quo regarding the very concept of a native speaker of English, (and the study of British and American English literature over the numerous other possible English literatures, but I won’t say more about literature here) is academia itself – and I don’t mean academic departments just in the US and UK.

Now I have talked before about the kind of sociolinguist I am. A large part of my scholarship over the past 20 years has focused on studying the spread of English, and its diversification in different parts of the world. However, my acceptance of diversity in Englishes is not something I have always taken for granted. I come from a family of English teachers, and two fairly staunch prescriptivists, at that. Particularly when it comes to classroom English. I have, on numerous occasions, faced the disdain of my parents for being accepting of new forms – for them, a corruption of the language, for the most part. For example, shortly after I first started my studies in the US, I recall as my mother’s dismay at my use of the verb “comprise” as a prepositional verb – “comprised of” – something I frequently encountered in the US. My mother had been taught in school, in India in the 1950s and 60s, that “compose of” and “comprise” were synonymous, but that “compose of” was a prepositional verb (although in her grammar lessons, the terminology was, no doubt, different), while “comprise” was not, and could not be followed by a preposition. I have a vivid memory of her stupor at my use of the preposition with the verb “comprise”. What on earth was I learning at American university? How could education, in America, no less, have fallen so much? What was happening to the English language? Sentiments such as these have, since that day in the early 1990s, frequently been expressed by both my parents, both veteran teachers and prescriptivists, specifically of what they still refer to as RP, Received Pronunciation. The Queen’s English. And while they are, doubtless, extremely proud of my scholarly accomplishments over the years, I think, although they would never admit it to me, they are somewhat conflicted by my now more than two-decade long love affair with World Englishes.

And the attitude of my parents, is, I think, by and large, that of English teachers across the world. As much as they might protest to the contrary. English teachers, by and large, uphold the “standards” of the academy.

And why? Well it’s a form of elitism, isn’t it? We can’t just let anyone in, willy nilly.

And it seems to me that one of our roles as teachers is to constantly try and separate the wheat from the chaff – and it is us teachers ourselves who determine both what is considered wheat-ness, and how much “wheat-ness” a student needs to have in order to make it. After all, a student couldn’t possibly graduate from an English department without the right amount of wheat-ness…goodness no. And how do we determine that? We revert to our ideas of what constitutes academic English, of course. “Standard” British and American academic English.

I remember years and years ago, my dad using this sentence as an example to illustrate something he was teaching: “There is no sartorial resplendency today because of the pluvial plenitude.” I remember laughing heartily. This is a sentence uttered by one of his economics professors in college (which must have been in the mid 1950s; the professor was, of course, a product of a very British education). And sentences like this were commonplace. Now as much as I laughed then, and as absurd as this sentence is, I’d wager most English teachers even today are more willing to accept this sentence over something like “I am not knowing the answer” – despite the fact that nobody would have any problem comprehending the latter. The former? Not so much. Because mere comprehensibility isn’t what we are after - it is academic perfection. Very specifically-defined.

And that’s why we remain the academic elite. And it seems, we want to. Despite our loud contrasting protestations.

Now I am not saying there shouldn’t be any standards at all. But. Why is it that all the standards are still those considered sacrosanct by the (academic) discourse communities of very specific areas of the world? And I don’t mean just grammatical standards. When I first started studying Applied Linguistics, I remember reading an article by Robert Kaplan, written in the 1960s, an article that was popularly called the “doodles” article – in which Kaplan highlighted different ways in which different cultures organized their thoughts. So his “doodles” represented different ways of organizing thought – and western linearity is just one. So why is it still THE one? Even though English has diversified tremendously. Even though numerous Englishes exist today, complete with their rules: grammatical, phonological, rhetorical, pragmatic, sociolinguistic...you get the drift.

White native speaker norms still have a stranglehold on English departments the world over. The world is changing. English has changed and continues to do so. But English departments, (and I think it is safe for me to make this generalization even though there are many the world over that are making some attempt), aren’t. The humanities the world over are in danger of becoming obsolete, and for decades, have struggled with making arguments for staying relevant. And I think we’re doing a fine job of making sure we don’t.

And I would be a complete hypocrite in not admitting my own role in this: I am, right now, the pot calling the kettle black. I am a cog in the wheel. I teach English at the university level, in an EFL context (and even my students here would consider the title to this piece completely ungrammatical). And a huge part of how I evaluate my students is based on their language – their linguistic or grammatical competence – based, of course, on native-speaker norms. Because I don’t have a choice.

Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.

So the food bit for today is in keeping with the discussion thus far, stemming from my appreciation for newness in language. All Tamilian kids love a certain kind potato curry, a potato podimas, if you read one of my first posts, and in our house, the potato curry. The unmarked variant. Potatoes diced up very small, and cooked very simply with typical south Indian spices. My brother and I loved this – still do. One of our favorite dinners was simple rice and dhal, with huge dollops of freshly-made ghee. And this potato curry. Yeah..not exactly a balanced meal. But yum. And the name of this dish in our household is Potateem - from my linguist dad. From the word phoneme, being the smallest sound unit. So potateem, is, naturally, the smallest unit a potato can be cut into. Of course.

And potateem stuck. And to the next generation of Balasubramanians and Hopkinses (my kids don’t have my last name), potateem it will be.

And while in all my posts thus far, I have talked about my mum’s prowess in the kitchen, potateem is all my dad. Because he loves these potatoes, and because he can dice up them up absolutely perfectly. You could measure each little piece against another, and they would be exactly the same size. I kid you not. And he is going to scoff when he sees my pictures of not-so-perfectly cut potateem in this post. But here’s the recipe.

Chandri's Kitchen

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