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?)
