speak right

Jispa’s teacher is in major pronunciation correction mode. She likes to get her accents right and everyday Jispa comes in with a new way to say a particular word. It was fun till some time. Just the other day I probably had enough of it. I started explaining my point of view to her. What is the most important job of a language?” I asked her. “To talk?” she replied. “To communicate” I corrected her. As long as the point is made by the speaker and received by the listener, language has done its job. Isn’t it? Surely accent correction is a possibly a desirable thing but it isn’t as important as our primary teacher would like us to believe. I explained to Jispa that “even the English language in UK would be spoken differently in different parts. The Scottish speak differently from the Welsh and also so do the Irish differ. It changes. Even our Gujarati changes from a person in Surat to a person in Ahmedabad. So who is to say which accent is right or wrong. I don’t know which accent your teacher is teaching you but remember it’s not that important to get it right. Grammar is possibly much more important. It can change meanings”. I gave her the favorite example of how a comma can completely change the meaning of a phrase.  “A panda eats shoots and leaves” versus “a panda eats, shoots and leaves”. She was pretty amazed at that example. Also it’s important to get your words right.

One big silly stupid thing I keep hearing from a lot of people is the word improvise instead of improve. For some reason people just like to use improvise instead of improve. That is completely wrong. I explained to Jispa the difference between the two – Improve is to do better and improvise is to perform with preparations. They can’t be used interchangeably. Now that is important. But accents... Yup they are nice to be corrected but, it’s finally not that critical. Especially not as important as the time we spend on correcting them. And most definitely not the pride we feel when we correct someone else. What’s there to be proud of an accent?

I remember once one really stupid teacher in school telling us that these British are now jealous of us because we speak much better English than them. I repeated this at home only for my sister to laugh at me. She asked me if I actually believed that we Indians actually spoke better English than the British and we were now going to tell them that their mother tongue is all wrong. Use our version instead!

Haha… That was an insightful moment. How certain things just stick in your head.

Of course some of the stuff that the teacher taught Jispa is right and good. Like inflammable is not spoken with the word being spoken different from the way we say flame. But some of the other stuff, we don’t know where she gets pronunciations from. So we just hear Jispa and just get the real thing from the online dictionary which also has the voice link. Now that Jasmine has a smart phone which is connected 24X7 she checks it instantly and explains the same to Jispa. There – so it’s either – nice… didn't know it was said like that or – buzz off, your teacher is a twerp!

As I was growing up English was a big thing. We were taught that knowing how to speak English differentiated us from the rest of India and will stand us in good stead, give us a competitive edge and propel us forward. All of that is true but what is also true is the importance of getting your point across in any language possible. I was surprised when I started my career to see a lot of Hindi being spoken inside meeting rooms in office. Now I am at ease with it. I break into bumbaiya Hindi at the drop of a hat and don't shy away from Gujju if I know that the other side responds. Focus on getting the point across rather than scoring a point. What say? (wow… that last line sounded pretty intelligent nah?)