Ay, kayko tension leta hai?” A sentence perfectly acceptable to a Mumbaikar, and comprehensible to just about any Indian who watches Hindi TV. Hinglish slang for urban lowlifes, you may think. But: is the word “tension”, as used here, English at all?
Here are the most fitting definitions of “tension” from two widely available English dictionaries. “[A] situation in which the fact that there are different needs or interests causes difficulties” and “a feeling of anxiety and stress that makes it impossible to relax” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary). “A situation or condition of hostility, suspense, or uneasiness” (Collins English Dictionary).
Good enough? Well, no, not quite. Our “tension” can accommodate such varied messages as “Why worry?”, “Don’t worry”, “Don’t take so much trouble over [something],” “Paaji, chill!” and “Stop bothering me.” It is also interesting, and possibly revealing, that we “take” tension rather than make it for ourselves, which suggests that tension comes from elsewhere.
Ought this “tension” to feature in an English dictionary sold in India? Don’t shudder — the professionals behind the big British dictionary names are hard at work doing just that kind of thing. That is, legitimating Indian English and putting it on the pages of unimpeachable products like the Oxford and Collins dictionaries, used around the world.
But they are not doing it first and foremost for a worldwide audience. Not every Oxford University Press (OUP) dictionary in the world, for example, carries the identical definition, or hierarchy of definitions, of a given word. Such things are determined by cultural context. Editions of OUP’s standard dictionaries sold in India respond closely to current Indian usage.
In India, the definition of the word “tempo” in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s includes “a three-wheeled vehicle for carrying goods”. In the same dictionary’s UK standard version, “tempo” is “the speed or rhythm of a piece of music” or “the speed of any movement or activity”. The Indian usage is nowhere in the hierarchy. (The desi three-wheeler does, however, feature in the biggest OUP dictionary there is, the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, which is now so big that most users subscribe to it online rather than buy the 20 hefty and expensive print volumes. That dictionary is expected to be comprehensive.)
Likewise “bath”, which in the UK is first defined as “a large, long container that you put water in and then get into to wash your whole body,” and in India is “an act of washing the whole of your body”. Or “block”, in the UK “a large piece of a solid material” and in India “a group of villages that form an administrative unit”. And “revert”, in the UK “to return to a former state” and in India simply “to reply”. These are English words given new meaning by Indians; there are dozens of wholly Indian words that the OUP admits to English, such as, recently, gherao (“encirclement”, protest).
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“English dictionaries need to be dictionaries of record, to describe how English is being used now,” says Elaine Higgleton, the Publishing Director for Collins UK’s dictionaries and language reference works. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, which is Collins’s world headquarters of dictionary-making, or lexicography. “We describe how the language is rather than say you must use it this way.” This is a different approach, she points out, to that of the French, who have given their august Academie Francaise the right to decide what is and is not French (out go le weekend and le parking, though both are freely used across France). “We can’t really talk about the Queen’s English,” says Dr Higgleton. English is a “magpie language” that has from the beginning grown through absorption. There is no neat line between English and not-English. There is UK standard, US standard and Indian standard, not to mention Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean, Canadian and other Englishes.
“Today morning”, for instance. It would sound illiterate to a native speaker in the UK, but Higgleton says the phrase should figure not only in an English dictionary for India but also “in any very large dictionary of English”. And “prepone”, a word she says Indian teachers of English absolutely “don’t want their children to use” but that nevertheless is so widespread that it figures in Collins’s English dictionaries for India.
The decision to include is not subjective. Lexicographers nowadays use high technology — a “corpus”, in fact, which is a vast collection of English words gleaned from every possible source, from books to the Internet to voice recordings and even, in some cases, emails and text messages (details are secret). OUP and Collins use huge corpora of well over 4 billion words each. These collections are constantly updated and heavily analysed. Among other things they tell lexicographers what new words are coming into use, since when, and how widespread the use is. If sufficiently widespread, lexicographers put the word into a dictionary. Indian English words enter UK dictionaries through this route.
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Higgleton knows what Indian schoolteachers are thinking because she meets them. She was in India last week, her fourth visit in two years. South and South-east Asia takes up half her time, she explains, even though it is nowhere near half of Collins’s worldwide market. Millions of people in India want to learn or improve their English, and this offers Collins, OUP, Cambridge University Press, Pearson, and a handful of other international and Indian publishers a big opportunity.
Collins and OUP in particular meet the opportunity with a broad range of products: dictionaries, grammar and usage guides, curriculum support, course material including exercises and, now, multimedia for every level from primary school to adult. They tune their educational portfolios to meet learners’ and teachers’ needs. Hence Higgleton’s visits to schools in the Delhi region. OUP’s dictionaries head Joanna Turnbull visited schools in Kolkata last month, for a similar reason.
In OUP’s India office eight people are at work India-checking their dictionaries. But each dictionary, especially bilingual ones (English-Hindi, English-Tamil, and so on, some of which sell in the lakhs every year), also gets its own panel of consultants, and two expert advisors — for each edition. The process, says an insider, is exhaustive, exhausting, and neverending. “We can’t even make a spelling mistake,” he says.
Collins is more centralised: it takes feedback from its Indian distribution partners Goyal and Ratna Sagar, but does all the work in Glasgow — even for its bilingual dictionaries in 15 languages. Neeraj Rawat, Collins’s India sales head, says they have queried Glasgow HQ over words like “uncle”, whose English definition fails to cover the many kinds of “uncle” in India, and some “sensitive” words in dictionaries for children.
But OUP takes the cake, with a trilingual dictionary in the works: English-Malayalam-Hindi, for “Malayalis working in Delhi who know neither English nor Hindi well enough”. Making this dictionary sounds like a real source of “tension”.
