That’s nang, innit bredren?

Aficionados of the Queen’s English (does Her Maj qualify any longer?) might balk at the news that an Englishman opines that English is now spoken better by ‘foreigners’ than by the English! Poor spelling and grammar are, according to a university lecturer, all too common among native British students. It has been claimed in the past that foreign students, especially those from the Commonwealth, often outperform their British counterparts when it comes to a basic command of the English language.

 

Perhaps the haughty folk at the Home Office and the admissions offices of the many overpriced British universities might be better off devising some sort of Test of English as a Native Language, rather than subjecting ‘foreigners’ to their ridiculous tests of a language many of their compatriots have forgotten. On second thoughts, though, this is refreshing news. It means that English in England is losing its old colonial stiltedness. That process had long been underway in the streets of Hackney and Stepney and the many Northern towns and cities that always had a healthy disregard for the pretensions of the South. Now, the groves of academe have become natural extensions of the High Street.

 

One only wishes that some of the street wisdom (with its hang-loose grammar) would find its way to Indian shores. Our English language schoolteachers, with their colonial hangover, continue to teach the sort of English that, anywhere in England, would be considered archaic. It does make some of us better than the English at English and it does do its bit for the BPO economy. But it is quite tiresome. Imagine a world without the ‘Wren and Martin’, the OED, figures of speech or any of the dreaded tortures we endured in the English period. That would be nang, innit?

 

PS: Apologies to readers in America, a country that, the British say, it is divided from the UK by common language!