The Adventure of English (33 page)

It did not happen.

There are many reasons given for this. Non-Hindi speakers objected to the proposed primacy of Hindi. There were riots in the streets — to reject Hindi and to retain English. And, pragmatically, the English language had dug deeply into systems of advancement and status. English gave access to the world; best seen in literature where, since independence, Indian novelists writing in English have made a tremendous contribution and been celebrated not only in India and Britain but in America and throughout the old Commonwealth and been translated all over the world. Yet it is still not straightforward even today. The young novelist Amit Chaudhuri, born in Calcutta and brought up speaking Bengali, writes his fiction in English.

English absorbed much from India. But India absorbed the whole of English as another of its languages. Today it is spoken fluently by four or five percent of the population, all of whom speak at least one other language just as fluently and often flick from one to the other scarcely noticing the join. Four to five percent may seem a small proportion, but in a country of India's size this means forty or fifty million people, what Lord Curzon, the viceroy, would have described as the better educated. Beyond that, it has been estimated that upwards of three hundred millions have some contact with it and some knowledge of it.

The Times
of India, in English, has treble the sales of
The Times
of London. Calcutta is garlanded with signs in English. India's writers use it with authority on the world stage in many disciplines: scientific, artistic, political, sociological.

The Raj quit India more than fifty years ago. English remains: and thrives.

I
ndies” was a misnomer from the start. Columbus came on them on his search for a westward route to India, and after such a long open sea voyage, with some justification he thought he had arrived at his destination and christened the inhabitants “Indians.” This is the first indication of the way in which language has to be examined with more than usual care when it comes from this string of Caribbean islands. “Caribbean” comes from “Carib,” the local name of one of the tribes.

Professor David Crystal has written that there are six varieties of “varying distinctiveness” for the area: “The situation is unique within the English speaking world, because of the way the history of the region has brought together two dimensions of variation: a regional dimension, from which it is possible to establish a speaker's geographical origins, and an ethnic dimension in which the choice of language conveys social and nationalistic identity.”

The Cambridge History of the English Language
is no less forbidding:

In some former British colonies, such as St. Lucia or Domenica, English is spoken largely as a second language. Then there are the varieties of pidgin and creole.

This is not altogether surprising. Though we gaily clump the islands together as “the West Indies,” we are talking about dozens of distinctive territories which can be separated by up to a thousand miles of ocean — in itself a certain recipe for variety as Darwin proved in the Galapagos Islands. We are also talking about Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch settlement as well as English: and most of all we are talking about the intensive enforced settlement of hundreds of thousands of Africans with scores of different African languages. And finally we are talking about the cross-fertilisation of that mix. What is surprising perhaps is that the prosody — the sound of the spoken language — is broadly homogeneous.

English arrived there late. By the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had established themselves in the New World, slavery had been introduced, the Portuguese were running slaves from West Africa and various European diseases had combined with Spanish intolerance to reduce immensely and in some cases to wipe out the indigenous population. The English came much later and at first stood offshore, as pirates, waiting for the treasure ships, especially the Spanish, which were looted by Drake and Hawkins and others with the tacit agreement of Queen Elizabeth. Early words which entered English from the West Indies included “doubloons” and “pieces of eight.”

Hakluyt's
Voyages,
a collection of sailors' tales first published in 1589, included this account by John Hawkins of his journey to Guinea and the Indies in 1564, which introduces us to a more domestic vocabulary:

So we have maize, potatoes and cannibals from “Indian” languages. “Cannibals” came from the alternative version of the name for the Carib people; they were also called “Canibales” and legendary for their ferocity and their ruthless treatment of captives. The Carib language gave English “cayman,” “curare” and “peccary” amongst much else. And from the other main local people, the Arawaks, English took “hurricane” (as well as “maize”), “guava,” “hammock,” “iguana” and “savannah.” “Canoe” and “potato” are Haitian.

But once out of the seas to the west, English looted every ship of tongues it encountered. From Nahautl, Aztec and Mexican came “chocolate,” “chilli,” “avocado,” “cocoa,” “guacamole,” “tamal,” “tomato,” “coyote,” “ocelot,” “mescal” and “peyote”: many of these indirectly through other European languages. It was the Spanish who conquered Peru but English was soon in there, capturing “condor,” “llama,” “puma,” “cocaine,” “quinine” and “guano.” The languages of Brazil, like Tupi and Guarani, are the original source of “cougar,” “jaguar,” “piranha,” “macaw,” “toucan,” “cashew” and “tapioca.” English was a hunter-gatherer of vocabulary, a scavenger on land and sea. The English sea dog became a popular hero, especially when he was annoying the Catholic King of Spain, who had put a price on the head of Elizabeth. Piracy was patriotic. “Freebooters,” they were called, “filibusters” (sixteenth century) and “privateers” and the “old sea-dogs” (seventeenth century). “Cutlass” was a century earlier, the “Jolly Roger” a century later, but robbery with violence on the high seas had a good press back in Britain and the words — “buccaneer” is another — had a chauvinistic swagger about them.

English settlement began in Bermuda in 1609, and reached the Caribbean in 1624 when Thomas Warner and twelve companions settled in Sandy Bay, St. Kitts. In 1626, the first African slaves arrived in St. Kitts, which was the first place where the British followed the example of the other European nations and systematically exploited slave labour. To begin with, tobacco was the crop. Sugar proved to be much more profitable — sugar needed more labour; the slave population grew, and into the crushed but not wholly eradicated native tongues of the West Indies, soon to be spliced and mated with the European implants, came the invasion of African languages. Even by the end of the sixteenth century, the Africans outnumbered the Europeans and the African population grew massively in the next century.

As always, the language revealed far more than an exchange of information. An eighteenth-century plantation manager called James Grainger wrote an epic poem in praise of Sugar Cane. There were critics in Britain who thought that Grainger was the first real writer to have come out of anywhere in the Americas. One reason must be that they saw their own supremacy of English mirrored in his verse: one will stand for all:

“Afric's sable progeny” had a different take on this work and different languages in which to express it. It was not made easy.

As I mentioned previously in writing about African slaves going to America, to prevent organised rebellions on board ship, the European slave traders to the West Indies also adopted the policy of splitting up tribes and this resulted in splitting up languages. One notion is that a language bonding began on these boats themselves and took the form of a sort of English picked up from the sailors. That has been disputed. What is not in question is that these wholly different language speakers once on their plantations soon found ways to communicate, ways which, inevitably given that they were working for British owners, used English.

There were two ways in which this was done (rather as with Gullah in America): one was pidgin; the other creole.

“Pidgin is a reduced language,” according to the
Cambridge History of the English Language,
“that results from extended contact between people with no language in common . . . Simplifications include reduction in numbers of words used and dropping complications such as inflections.” “Two knives” becomes “two knife”; accusative forms are used as nominatives, as in “him” for “he” — “him can read”; plurals are formed from a singular noun and “dem” — “de dog dem” for “the dogs”; simplification of verb forms, e.g. the passive form, is avoided — “de grass cut” for “the grass has been cut”; auxiliary “do” omitted from questions — “why you hit him?”; adjectives used in place of adverbs — “I do it good.”

Pidgin is a brilliant instant shorthand invented for survival. Creole is a full language developed by the sons and daughters of pidgin speakers. These children would find that their parents' pidgin English was of more general use to them than their native African language. Out of this, the children would organise what was in effect a new language; they would creolise the pidgin. Words would be creolised and grammar would reassert itself. Some linguists believe that this extraordinary and miraculously rapid (a single generation) grammatical development is due to an innate human instinct, that part of the brain “has” grammar wired in like a whistling whale has a whistle. But there are other scholars in the West Indies who believe that the creole spoken there is directly descended from the Niger-Congo language family to which all the very different West African languages ultimately belonged. The argument here is that forms were borrowed from English but used in a structure which was West African.

Dr. Hubert Devenish of the University of the West Indies puts one case. He says “Me go run school” would be translated into English as “I ran to school.” The West Indian version would be considered inferior, and ignorant. But he points out that “go” is the directional marker telling you where you're running to, whereas the English form has a preposition, and the “go” form, which is a straightforward verb, like “Me go there,” would mean “I went there.” But in “Me run go school,” “go” would be used as a preposition, i.e. “me run
go/to
school.” So creole simply switched verbs to prepositions when their grammatical drive needed it: just as, on many previous occasions in the progress of English, nouns had been used as verbs and vice versa. Far from being ignorant, this is a wholly valid adaptation. The other case made from this same example is that West African languages like Yoruba and Edo are one of the few groups of languages which do in fact have those sort of constructions, and “run go” is a prize instance.

In the later eighteenth century on St. Kitts, at about the same time that James Grainger was being elegant and pastoral about “the Sugar Cane,” a carpenter called Samuel Matthews wrote down some examples of the language he heard used by black creole speakers. He was dealing in sounds which had not been written down before but a close look at four lines can give some insights into the language:

There is a lot which is characteristic of creole in those few words. Most of them are English — an example, as in Gullah, of the deep flexibility of English, rising to the challenge of as it were binding a new language out of a variety of languages from a different language group entirely. Spoken in a St. Kitts accent, and even on the page, the second striking fact is that the sounds have shifted. And some words have been put through the prism of West Africa: “brother” has become “buddy” — later a very widely used word, but this is the first record we have of it. “Overseer” has become “Obeshay” and by repeating these words up against each other a few times we can easily comprehend how that happened. The “wh” of “what” becomes a “v” (Sam Weller would have approved), the “i” in “believe” becomes an “r” in “bree”; the “th” of “that” becomes a “d” in “daw” or “dat.” Many African languages have a rule that a syllable can only have one consonant and one vowel, so when English combines consonants, creoles often reduce it to a single letter: here the “st” and “nd” of “stand” become a “t” and an “n” — “tan.” English vocabulary plus African grammar equals a new word: stand — tan.

There are non-English words here too. “Boekra” comes from the African word for “white man”; “sauby” from “saber,” the Portuguese word “to know”; and as the verses go on there is the word “morrogou” which is derived from French.

Some other words first recorded in the texts of Samuel Matthews and others on St. Kitts include “How come?”; “kackar” or “caca” for “excrement” (though there is the Old English “cachus,” meaning latrine); “bong,” “bang” meaning to hit, “ugly” meaning evil, “pikni” for “child,” “grande” for “big,” and “palaver” for “trouble” or “argument.”

There are also French creoles. Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for his epic poem
Omeros
which is set among the fishermen on the island, was brought up with formal English as his first language and French creole as his “kitchen and street tongue.” In some of his work they rub together. It is the rubbing together of words as well as the new grammar and the multiple springs they draw on which make creole a rich source for historians and sociologists as well as linguists.