ENGLISH-VINGLISH

 Just the other day, I spotted two school girls in the market. While mom busied herself with the groceries, I amused myself with their conversation (sincerely not eavesdropping..!!)

            
“Hey, look at the cool dress I got. Isn’t it awesome?”                                                             
“Yup. The design is so famous, like you know, in the fashion these days. I mean everyone's talking about it."                                 

 “Anyways, did Deeps (Deepika) call you?”

 “Nope. I guess she’s kinda busy”.

 “I hope she comes for the party tomorrow, it’s like boring without her.”

And so they continued chatting. At first, I felt happy about the fact that finally the teens have started speaking English among themselves, be it even as a style statement. After hearing their conversation, I wished they would come back to Hindi. Most of their words or rather slang are a disgrace to English! All the ‘credit’ goes to these social networking sites that tremendously encourage usage of such shortcuts or meaningless phrases. If an English expert happens to observe the chats of the youth here, he would pity on the brutal assassination of English grammar…

            
There’s a whole new range of words of yet new spellings, leave alone the rules. It’s an entire new language. ‘Because’ becomes ‘becoz’ or ‘coz’ ; ‘great’ becomes ‘gr8’ and ‘school’ becomes ‘skool’.

Always being surrounded by such a vocabulary, the children grow up with this knowledge, therefore lack the ability to make use of proper language even at the required places. If you type their status updates in MS-Word, I am sure all of it would be highlighted with the ‘red zigzag lines’. The highly popular abbreviations and acronyms have replaced the original words and phrases.

            
Using shortcuts is not at all bad. In fact, it is sometimes necessary to use them while taking down notes or sending urgent messages. Shortcuts were invented to save time while using SMSs. However, here the scenario is different. While chatting on facebook or mobiles, taking 10 minutes to think of a reply and then using shortcuts is total foolishness.

Using shortcuts also becomes wrong when we fail to distinguish where to and where not to use them. If one uses the ‘shortcut language’ in English examinations, which happens quite often, I am afraid one might have to be a repeater in English….

            
Due to excessive use of the facebook jargon, teens have lost the simple sense to identify the logic behind the words they speak. For instance,

I mean

It’s often pronounced (I min). At least they should pronounce it properly! Obviously we mean what we say..!!

I guess

They actually mean, ‘I think’. You can’t probably be guessing all the time..!!

Anyways

Hell, where did they get this word from? Do we say ‘anybody’ or ‘anybodies’? Then how do we have ‘anyways’? The correct one is ‘Anyway’.

Awesome!

Ah, here’s the main one. The favourite word of girls. Most of the brats who use this word, do not even know what ‘awe’ means. It is a feeling of respect with terror or fear. So, an awesome dinosaur in Jurassic Park is okay, but how can a beautiful profile picture be awesome…?

The most annoying one is ‘Howz u’? In this case, one cannot say it’s a shortcut. Typing a ‘z’ or an ‘r’ takes equal time..! It is just another case of mistakenly assumed style statement.

Not only the words, even pronunciation of some of the words is equally exasperating. While trying to prove themselves stylish, they do exactly the opposite which takes them far from style. It is a great misconception among most of the teens that speaking English in a stylish way by twisting or turning the words is the 'in-thing' while proper and correct English is reserved for the old and the professor-likes.

It does not matter what language you speak. What matters is how you speak. Sophistication comes not from the language but from the manner of speaking the language. Speaking Hindi while in  groups or over dinners etc. is considered out of fashion these days. In reality, the charisma of a fluent Hindi speaker can be much more than that of an ill-English speaking person.

We shouldn't forget that everything, say culture or as in this case, every language, has its unique value and that it should be performed or spoken in its own style, maintaining its decorum. For instance, don't we laugh at foreigners who speak Hindi in an unusual way? In the same way, it is very  funny to see someone  speak tampered English.

So, let us learn to respect every dialect or language, so that we don't make fools out of ourselves.....