Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education (1835) underscored a simple fact: Britain was the world’s most powerful nation at the time. It was from this perspective that he argued eloquently that the government of British India would be better off spending its education budget teaching Indians English rather than on local language education.
Since he wrote with the blasé racism quite common for his time, Indians often miss the point when they indignantly focus on the part about creating “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.
Whether English in taste etc or not, it is fair to say that Macaulay’s Children have been beneficiaries of the policies that followed that Minute for more than a century after his death. Had the Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council lived to the end of the 21th century, he may have been gratified to see English become the global lingua franca in all its many quirky variations (yes, even most French and Germans deign to speak it!). He “sowed the seeds of modernisation and globalisation in the British Empire, and by extension across the world,” wrote Zareer Masani in his recent splendid biography of Macaulay.
True, but here’s an issue. The sun set on the British Empire many aeons ago. Its former colony, the United States of America, has been the world’s largest and most influential economy for over a century. Should Macaulay’s Children now become Jefferson’s Children? To translate: should India jettison its Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage and switch to American English?
Why Jefferson’s Children? A line of explanation. Thomas Jefferson, we know, drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the document that became the basis for the creation of the United States. In it, three words appear thus: “civilized”, “organizing” and “Honor”, a little-noticed indication of the manner in which the differences would evolve in that evolving nation (of course, he also wrote “compleat” and “hath shewn”, suggesting tenuous ties to the mother country). Today, it would be fair to say that, in terms of usage, there are as many Jefferson’s Children in the world as Macaulay’s.
American English is the language in use among the world’s major multilateral institutions, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and even in powerful regional groupings like the Asian Development Bank. Elsewhere, it’s predictably businesses that have unconsciously taken the lead in adopting the language of the world’s most powerful nation. In Europe, for instance, though British English is used in official documents, many businesses use American English.
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This is also the case in most former British colonies across Asia, including the eastern part of the continent, the focus of Manmohan Singh’s Look East policy. In Southeast Asia, the record is mixed since some countries were colonised by the British and later dominated by American business. Thus, both businesses and governments in Thailand, China and Japan, which were never colonised by western powers (though Japan was occupied by US forces after World War II), use American English. Likewise in Indonesia, colonised by the Dutch and Indo-China (French). In Malaysia and Singapore, which are former British colonies, government communications are in British English but most businesses use American English.
In India, perhaps predictably, the record of usage follows no pattern. The government of India communicates in British English, as do most of the older large corporations (though many are not averse to the Americanism of using “corporate” as a noun). Many analysts’ reports, on the other hand, are written in American English.
Today, even if we exclude the distinctive patois of SMSes (“texts” in British usage) and Twitter, English learners coming out of India’s schools and colleges automatically lean towards American usage. No doubt its logic is easier to follow — shorter and marginally more phonetic spellings (labor instead of labour, center instead of centre), lack of distinction between verbs and nouns (license and licensed), and odd punctuation of plural words (CEO’s).
True, language protocol is a small point that probably impacts a minority of professional writers, editors, sub-editors (including those in Business Standard, which grimly clings to British usage) and government bureaucrats. But if we go by the truism that effective communication is often about optics, the switch to American English – together with jettisoning lakh, crore and half-hour time differences – may be a useful subliminal message to send out to a world uncertain whether India is open for business or not.