Language Matters

Previously published in The Island on Wednesday 29^th April 2009

I believe that reinvigorating language instruction in our education system is one of the most vital themes that we, as a newly resurgent nation, must treat with unstinted attention and commitment. This is because, if education is assumed to aim at the overall development of the individual, and thereby that of the society, no other subject on the educational curriculum may be thought to affect such development as potently as language training does.

The view expressed here may be at odds with the traditionally popular notions about the relative importance of subjects or subject streams in our formal education system, such as that mathematics is more important than drawing, or that ‘science’ subjects are superior to ‘arts subjects’, or that subjects involving manual skills (carpentry, bricklaying, motor mechanism, etc.) are lowly. However, these attitudes are fast becoming obsolete today, thanks to the growing awareness among our people of the fact that the value of whatever one learns does not depend on whether or not it qualifies one for a sedentary job deemed important, but on whether or not it equips one with a useful skill to provide an essential service to the society, in addition to contributing to one’s intellectual and moral development. If the last mentioned criterion is accepted as the measure of the importance of any subject on offer, then all subjects will be considered equally important.

Yet, in view of its unique nature, language should be treated as ‘primus inter pares’ among educational disciplines! The most obvious characteristic that distinguishes language from other subjects is that language , unlike the rest, is indispensable for the study of all subjects including language itself, because language constitutes the vital medium for the construction and communication of thoughts and ideas within any conceptual area.

Education is generally a matter of acquiring knowledge and skills. Language is the vehicle through which this is done. Acquisition of knowledge involves precise thinking, and language is the principal tool by means of which humans are able to do it. Clear thinking is impossible without language. In short, language is knowledge.

Although for my present purpose I have chosen to stress the importance of language as a tool for the formulation and communication of concepts, and the gaining of received knowledge in any field of intellectual engagement, the usefulness of language goes far beyond that. Social interaction, for example, needs language. When a number of human beings get together, especially if they are known to each other, the most natural thing they do is talk, much of the time not for the purpose of exchanging any important information, but for the purpose of socializing. Another function that language performs is forming and maintaining cultural bonds among people of the same community. Language also reinforces intra- and inter-community cultural, economic, and political relationships. These are just a few examples of the functions of language.

Up to this point I have been talking about language as an abstraction, and using the word ‘language’ in its generic sense (meaning natural human language). There are over 4000 different realizations of this uniquely human, basically vocal, signaling system (i.e. more than 4000 different languages) in the world today. In addition to these there are artificially constructed ‘languages’ like computer language, sign languages, Esperanto, etc. They are all signaling systems.

None of the over 4000 languages of the world can be described as linguistically superior or inferior to any other. But we know that a few of the world’s languages do stand out, and appear intrinsically of a higher order than others. The reason that explains the relative ‘super power’ status of certain countries or blocs can be used to explain the apparently inherent ‘excellence’ of some languages such as English, French, German, Russian or Chinese: this is a matter of the balance of power – economic, technological, political , and military - between the countries whose peoples speak these languages as their first or native languages, and other countries where the linguistic communities use other languages. World or international languages mentioned above are among the most powerful languages in the contemporary world. So it is not a problem of the relative intrinsic superiority or inferiority of any particular human language/s, but a matter of ‘power’ which is neither right nor wrong. And this has been the case throughout the linguistic history of the world.

All languages serve equally well and equally efficiently the communities which use them for their purposes. When the speakers of one language find it too inadequate a medium to express the new concepts that come from foreign sources, or the new thoughts and feelings that they themselves generate in their own naturally evolving cultural milieu, they either borrow elements from the languages of those foreign sources or learn those languages as additional linguistic mediums (i.e. as second or foreign languages).

We in Sri Lanka, though ours is a small island, have two of the world’s oldest languages spoken by the majority of its population, with well authenticated literary histories of thousands of years. This is a claim that no one can challenge. Yet, I am afraid, we appear to be moving towards the position of one of the most inarticulate societies of the world (!), judging by the very obvious regressive trend of utter ignorance and indifference especially on the part of the mass media and government authorities where the absolute need for the serious study and use of language is concerned. It goes without saying that this is an educational matter.

Probably I need not emphasize that I am thinking of the present linguistic situation in our country where mainly three languages are in use. The observations made here are based on my experience of Sinhalese and English as they are in circulation particularly among media people, and persons of authority. My Tamil speaking friends, who share my concerns, say that the situation in Tamil also reflects the same attitudes of neglect and indifference.

What I have often seen is that actual or affected failure to speak in intelligible Sinhala using a commonly accepted idiom is an affliction found particularly among the educated urban elite (something which is, unfortunately, percolating to the villages). Some important persons (including, for example, government ministers, university dons, department heads, corporate bosses, even diplomats) seem inarticulate both in their own mother tongue and in their supposed lingua franca, English, something that is coming to public notice at this time of national crisis when an authentic representation of what is actually happening here is of vital importance to the country in the face of the overwhelmingly adverse publicity we are being subjected to by the enemies of the Sri Lankan state.

A relevant but paradoxical phenomenon that I have observed is the admirable language savvy of the rural peasants (monolingual with their average level of literacy) revealed in TV programmes on agricultural matters, as opposed to the tongue-tied awkwardness that often inhibits the expressive power of the highly educated consultants or bigwigs in corresponding situations. Should we conclude that this is attributable to some defect of our education system? It certainly looks as if we should. It may be that those peasants escaped from that system before their expressive power suffered any damage?

Having said this, however, I must hasten to add some qualifications to the foregoing. First, there are many media professionals, government officials, and members of the general public who evince a healthy level of linguistic awareness and concern (and I say ‘May their tribe increase!’). Then, I am not under the spell of some puritanical spirit that seeks to defy the natural phenomenon of continuous language change. (In fact, such change is a factor that helps maintain the ever renewing sharpness and power of the tool that language is.) A third reservation that I would like to make explicit is that I do not necessarily condemn the excessive ‘code switching’ (mixing of elements of one language in another in the same sentence, or in a longer text) that our young and old alike indulge in in the course of common conversation (often repeated in teledramas) so long as it does not permanently harm the identity of what is accepted as a distinct language by its users, be it English, Sinhalese or Tamil. Most such mixings are almost always limited to vocabulary, and are ephemeral. But some words, in the course of time, seem to earn ‘permanent resident’ status in the borrowing language, and get assimilated into the general word stock of the host language. No language in the world is free from such migrant populations; long residence in the host language renders them indistinguishable from the original inhabitants of that particular linguistic landscape. It is a (natural) process that has always enriched the vocabulary of languages, and has enhanced their powers of expression. This is true of Sinhalese, Tamil, English, and other languages. English perhaps has the most hybrid lexicon of the three. (‘Nelumbium’, a kind of water-lily must be from the Sinhalese ‘nelum’; ‘tourmaline’ is thought to have been derived from the Sinhalese? word ‘thoramalli’, carnelian or cornelian, a precious stone; the English word ‘cash’ meaning coin or money is said to be from Tamil ‘kasu’; ‘Koinmanike’ used to be a very common name for a female in the Kandyan areas until a few decades ago with its ‘koin’ part being a ‘Sinhalised’ version of the English word ‘queen’; the rate of mutual borrowing between Tamil and Sinhalese is naturally higher than that between one of them and English; there are probably hundreds of such borrowings scattered among our three main languages). Finally, I am not saying that any one of the three languages Sinhalese, Tamil, and English which are of vital importance for us must be forced down the throats of all Sri Lankans with or without any apparent justification. The desire to learn an additional language must be spontaneous. This happens when there is a genuinely desired goal to achieve by learning that language.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s inspiring example of addressing Tamil audiences in Tamil without any sign of condescension or patronage is something to be emulated. He uses his knowledge of the language as a second language to reach out to those Tamil citizens who have felt alienated from the rest of the Sri Lankan polity due to three decades of separatist war; his growing popularity among them is a clear demonstration of his success.

My plea is for language training to be given more attention in our school and higher education systems, and for raising awareness of the importance of learning and using languages properly as essential resources for individual and social development, and also of the inestimable value of our own native languages (Sinhalese and Tamil) as inalienable cultural treasures.

The talk we frequently hear these days about a trilingual system (English, Tamil, Sinhalese) would not be without sense if it was given a realistic interpretation. All three languages figure in our national consciousness as important. In general, one can say that Sinhalese is the naturally handy linguistic tool that the Sinhalese speakers have and that it is part of their cherished cultural heritage; Tamil stands in a similar relationship to the Tamil speakers. Now English may be said to possess dual significance: it is the mother tongue of a section of the Sri Lankan population, however small that community may be; at the same time, it qualifies for the status of an indispensable second language for both the Sinhalese and Tamil speakers.

In my opinion, while trilingual proficiency could be a desirable goal for some individuals, bilingual proficiency (meaning proficiency in English and one of the two

native languages) is an absolute national need.

My own experience is that language is not, and has never been, a divisive factor in our country, just as religion is not a divisive factor, unless of course wily politicians and certain anti-national elements decide for their own purposes to use language and religion as issues to wreck the unity among the different communities. The linguistic scenario that has always prevailed among the ordinary people is this: in any region of the country the minority community learn to speak the language of the majority in that area irrespective of ethnicity, which means that the Sinhalese living in the Tamil majority areas learn Tamil, and vice versa. The elite of both communities who had enjoyed a privileged status under the British at the expense of the dispossessed common masses, and somehow got ensconced in the same privileged position decades into the post-Independence era, had always adopted English as their mother tongue, and cut themselves off from their historical and cultural roots. They were/are actually a minuscule minority, though invested with much power over the rest of the population through their association with the foreign rulers in pre-Independence times. In their case, of course, in one sense at least, language was a uniting factor: it held them united within their own elite cabal; in another sense, English kept them alienated from the oppressed majority of their own kind. The long desired changes in the education sphere that took place during the period 1944 to 1961 including the change of the medium of instruction from English to Sinhala and Tamil vastly benefited this deprived majority by opening to them educational opportunities earlier confined to the privileged few, while it might have a little inconvenienced the elite minority without actually harming them in any serious way other than threatening to evict them from their undue privileged position..

Fortunately for the country, the ‘English only’ class (to borrow a phrase from a recent contributor to The Island) is today a moribund species. It is they who make the unrealistic (and in an important sense, philistine) proposal that English should again replace Sinhalese and Tamil as the medium of instruction in our school system. These people can pontificate from their individual English utopias, but no government can ignore the fact that the vast majority of our people (about 72% of the population) still live in rural villages without a chance to receive a decent education even in their own mother tongue, Sinhalese or Tamil, let alone English. (This is not to deny that basic educational facilities have reached the remotest parts of the country. The problem is that these still remain too rudimentary to be described as fair.)

Educational reforms such as the scrapping of the teaching of history in schools, and the reintroduction of the English medium mainly proposed as solutions to the ‘ethnic’ crisis are now proving to be irrelevant answers to a non-existent problem. The first ‘historical’ mistake – the cancellation of history lessons in schools- has now been corrected. The reintroduction of the English medium is perhaps an irreversible step, and it should not be retracted; it must remain as one of the mediums of instruction available to whoever needs or wants to use it as such. What I would object to is English being made the only medium of education in our country on the pretext that this will lead to national unity. The adoption of a common language by itself will not achieve communal harmony unless certain more important issues are settled first.

The main reason why I would object to making English the only medium of instruction is that there is no need for that, for the majority of our people Sinhalese and Tamil are adequate as mediums for school education, and these are easily accessible. We have enough teachers to teach in these mediums. The fact that most of our children come from Sinhalese and Tamil speaking homes should not be ignored. If English is made the sole medium of education, there will be many problems besetting such a scheme. We don’t have enough teachers capable of teaching the various subjects in English. Then there is the problem of textbooks, and other resources. True, all such needs could be supplied to a few schools in towns, but the majority of our 10,000 schools are in rural areas with few infra-structure facilities. How can we continue to hope to guarantee equality of opportunity to all in these circumstances? (Even now when nearly all school-goers except a small number who have opted to join the English stream available in a few government schools study in Sinhala or Tamil, it is difficult to ensure equality of opportunity. Won’t the introduction of English as the only medium of education further complicate this matter?)

In a country where over half a century of teaching English as a second language is deemed to have been a failure to date in view of the poor exam results at the O/L, the low proficiency in English that the average fresh university entrant shows, the less than desirable competence level of the majority of school English teachers, the inferior quality of the government English textbooks prepared by experts, and many other related factors, to make English the sole medium of education will make no sense, to say the least.

Banishing Sinhalese and Tamil from the classroom as mediums of education while only retaining them as mere subjects will stop the children from using them for creative thinking. This will be cultural suicide for the speakers of those languages. A language will survive and flourish only so long as it is employed by its users to engage in creative intellectual pursuits such as producing literary works, writing books dealing with various subjects, translating into and out of it, and so on.

What we can and should do is to make a success of our teaching of English as a second language programme using the local resources and expertise available by correctly mobilizing these. In the case of English there is no choice. Every child, while studying in his or own mother tongue, must be offered a chance to learn English as a second language and reach such a high level of competency as will enable him or her to enhance their higher education and employment prospects through that medium. Where Sinhalese and Tamil are concerned the situation is different.

No one will willingly learn another language without a good enough reason. There is a lot of motivation for acquiring a knowledge of English among both the Sinhalese and Tamil speakers, and this point needs no elaboration. The average Sinhalese speaker, on the other hand, will feel no special desire to learn Tamil; neither will the average Tamil speaker want to learn Sinhalese. This is natural and is to be expected. But if they are provided with a sound reason they will not be averse to learning each other’s language.

What generates unity among different ethnic, religious, or social groups is not necessarily a common language. A shared language can only be a concomitant of something more important – a community of interests and needs. If we can ensure this, it will provide the motivation necessary for Sinhalese and Tamils to learn each other’s language as a second language. For example, the government could stipulate that all government servants must be bilingual in Sinhala and Tamil to get promotions, salary increases, etc., the true reason for such a stipulation being the need for bilingual personnel to serve a multiethnic clientele monolingual in their own languages. Any ethnic harmony that may result from the presence of bilingual speakers will only be incidental, but ethnic harmony as a goal can rarely be used to persuade people to learn a new language. Often the problem of language does not come into play at all. If as Sri Lankans we are given a chance to enjoy equal rights as citizens of a well governed democracy, we will be united; there will be no cause for disunity then.

We Sri Lankans are fortunate in having some rich linguistic resources in the form of three highly developed languages. To make use of these unique resources for our own individual advancement and also for the development and wellbeing of our society, let us give language instruction in our education setup, be it English, Sinhala or Tamil, the high priority it deserves.

Rohana R. Wasala