India's Endangered Languages

196 Indian languages are in danger of extinction, according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Ahom, Aimol, Andro, Chairel, Kolhreng, Rangkas, Sengmai, Tarao, Tolcha are some the languages that are already extinct, according to a report in Outlook, which also provides a map showing the regional distribution of the threatened languages. Essentially, they are clustered on the margins of the Hindi heartland - the mountain regions where Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken,the tribal regions of central and south India, the North-East and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. You can find another report here, and the Atlas itself is available online here.

Bangalore Banter

Bengalooru Banter is a blog that provides samples of Bean Town bakwas, like these overheard conversations or this list of Kanglish (Kannada + English) slang. A few examples from Bikerdude's slang dictionary:

AJM: Short for Akkan Jusht Missu (Lit: Elder Sister just missed) 1. Minor disappointment 2. Narrow escape. "Aye ticket siktheno?" "Illa lo, AJM agoythu." Do not use in polite company!

Budding: Short for Brigade road Up and Down. bangalore's most popular pastime. (Also Mudding - MG road Up and Down)

Free kotre phenoylu kudithaane : Lit: If its free, he'll even drink phenyl. Curmudgeon, compulsively economical person.

Meetru : Lit: (autorickshaw) Meter. Gumption/cheek. "Yeno, eshto ning meetru?"

Mishtik : Lit: Mistake. Used for errors, leave, illnesses, sudden departures, misunderstandings, deletions, etc.

Raiyya: From the English "Right" (used by bus conductors after passengers have got off or on at a bus stop). To leave/depart. "Boss picture mugdid takshna naan mane tava raiyya."

Simp-simply : Translated from the kannada sum-sumne. For no reason at all. "Aye don’t simp-simply come and dishtrub me I say."

Further linguistic confusion in this post which reproduces a conversation in the hybrid 'Kan-Tam' (Kannadized Tamil)spoken in the city's Malleswaram area. Dig in.

Indian English: Language & Culture

Indian English: Language & Culture is a Lonely Planet guide to the quirks of English as spoken in India. Essential if you're a visitor mystified by travel agents who want to 'prepone' your ticket: I'm less certain that a phrasebook of this kind can help anyone decipher a conversation in Hinglish, or even your average Mumbai tabloid. Worth a look, nevertheless. (I should add here that I served as a consultant on this project - my contribution, however, was limited to pointing out some obvious errors and suggesting a few sample phrases).

Indian English Illustrated

Ingenious. Memsaab Story presents Indianisms like 'tight slap', 'shoe-bite' and many more in grabs from sub-titled Bollywood flicks.

Brag-rapping, Hyderabad style

Khallas

A new book on the jargon of bhai-land:

It is a world where anaar (pomegranate) is a grenade, “artist” a shooter, atthais (28) an alcoholic, baja (musical instrument) a handgun, blue a Rs. 100 note, “camera” a weapon, “capsule” a bullet, chabbis (26) a young promiscuous girl, “Clinton” fake American dollar bills, “Delhi” is Dubai, “Indian bat” a country-made revolver, jhadu (broom) is an assault weapon, “Kanpur” is Karachi…

The Hindustan Times has an extract here. The author is a well-known crime reporter who's covered Mumbai's crime beat for the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times, so I guess he knows what he's talking about when he tracks the origin of underworld slang terms to specific gangs:

Dana Live rounds, a relatively old term, can be traced back to Dawood and the early 1980s.
Item Sexy damsel. Originally coined for Meenakshi Sharma, who wanted to join Bollywood but ended up as a key operative in Babloo Shrivastava's gang.
Zero dial The informer, as he was known in Dawood's stronghold Dongri, in South Mumbai.

The extract features a few slang words new to me:

Gaddi (Train) The position of practising sodomy inside a crammed jail.
Lift-wali building 9 mm Caliber Semi-automatic Star Pistol. So called because bullets are pushed upwards by a spring in an automatic pistol, just like an elevator.
Roti A term used by intelligence officials to denote compact discs (CDs), which are often dispatched through couriers

Dress dada

A dress dada is not a preening street goon or a transvestite toughie, it's a respectful Bollywood term for a senior dressman. 'Dada' here is the Marathi word for 'elder brother' and is used liberally on Bollywood sets, as explained in this posting to Sarai:

As I learnt early on, a production unit has certain unwritten codes such as an established system of address. Everyone calls everyone else 'xyz-ji'. This old-world form of 'respectful' address has found much favour in the film industry. It actually helps maintain a certain amount of professional distance and creates an atmosphere where the very politeness of the form of address disallows (to some extent) ugly exchanges. Representatives of departments like make-up and dress are called Make-up dada and Dress dada respectively. The guys in charge of properties (art direction) are clubbed together as Setting dada. (Debashree Mukherjee, 'Making Of Johny Johny, Yes Papa', Sarai)

With folded hands

Jug Suraiya discusses the anatomical impossibility of this Indian English phrase:

A couple of columns ago I used the typically Indian phrase 'with folded hands', a gesture implying, among many other things, entreaty or surrender. A reader has pointed out that while the phrase is, indeed, in common use, it represents an anatomical impossibility much more so than that suggested by the other choice Indian Englishism: my head is eating circles (a direct translation from the Hindustani 'Mera sir chakkar kha raha hai').

Automatic Hinglish

Google Translate now offers translation from English to Hindi and vice versa. Type in some text and check out the results. Chances are you'll get some garbled nonsense, but with computer-generated translation, that's par for the course. What's surprising is that if you translate from English to Hindi and convert the results back to English, some of the original text is restored. Here's a portion of Hamlet's soliloquy in Google Hindi:

' Tis एक consummation
श्रद्धापूर्वक को wish'd. करने के लिए मौत की नींद के लिए.
नींद के स्वप्न को perchance करने के लिए: सॉफ्टवेयर, यही तो कठिनाई है!

That's completely meaningless, of course. But feed this drivel to the Google translator, and it becomes Shakespeare again - with a few improvements.

'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to wish'd. To death for sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream: software, there's the rub!

Software, there's the rub: truer words have never been spoken. Coming up: Surdas in Hinglish ('Surdas, Braja is very bad now, kahe not let ubare') and Google's take on hip-hop lyrics, which is so polite, you'll never feel the need for a Parental Advisory ('Shake your booty' translates as 'Hilayein apni loot').

The Elvis of English

This is off-topic somewhat, but I can't resist linking to this great New Yorker piece on China's 'Elvis of English'. Li Yang, founder and chief teacher at Li Yang Crazy English, trains Chinese tongue muscles with an ESL technique that has been described as 'English as a Shouted Language'. Rapidex, Chinese style:

Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.
“Would!”
“Would!”
“Like!”
“Like!”
“To!”
“To!”
“Take!”
“Take!”
“Your!”
“Your!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before. (How a patient might react to such bluster was anyone’s guess.)

Chak De Again

Think I'll take Sidhu's word for it (in this case, he may actually know what he's talking about):

The intricate meaning of the word is Chak De Phatte, Nap De Killi. Killi is a small lever that you pull. And when you pull it, the water starts gushing into the fields through a motor. Now that Killi is always invariably hidden under a well. And that well is covered by wooden planks. So you lift the phatta, i.e. Chak De Phatta, and then you pull the killi. And then the water starts flowing, gushing into the fields. So it's got everything to do with positivity,' said Navjot Singh Sidhu, former Indian cricket player.

Chak de phatte

Turn on the car radio, and chances are a bhangra number will come on soon enough, urging you to 'chak de phatte'. All very good and rousing, but uhm, what is one supposed to do beyond the usual one-legged hop with fingers pointing heavenwards (whiskey glass balanced on head, optional)? I know what the phrase means literally, something like 'lift up the planks' in Punjabi, but how exactly does one chak the said phattas? And what is the true origin of this now ubiquitous Punjabi slang phrase? I googled around a bit and found quite a few explanations, most of them spurious no doubt. Here are the more plausible origins, this first one from the Urban Dictionary :

Chak De Phatte -though loosely translated as pick up the floorboards is more of a war cry than a housekeeping call. The origins of the phrase lie in the times when the Khalsa i.e. the original warrior Sikhs were formed, they would cross canals and attack Mughal camps in a blitzkrieg attack and then just as they came would retreat leaving the enemy helpless. The sport of tent pegging also evolved from this camp raiding where the riders would remove the pegs of the tents trapping the occupants under, what then used to be a very heavy fabric. While escaping back to their base the Khalsa warriors would dismantle any temporary bridges constructed by them(made out of 'Phatte') to prevent the Mughals from chasing them and sometimes to prevent the enemy from escaping, hence the cry 'Chak De Phatte'. The phrase then acquired the meaning: to complete the route. And is now used as in the figure of 'Bring the house down!'.

And here's another plausible explanation, found in a comment posted by Subrat to a review of the movie Chak De at Water, No Ice:

Chak De comes from Chak De Phatte. While the term loosely does mean ‘come on’ or ‘go for it’ (obvious from its usage), it traces its origins to the farms of Punjab. The motor which pumps water into the fields is normally underground and is covered with wooden planks (called phatte in Punjabi). When you want to turn on the motor, you were asked to ‘chak de phatte’ which meant turn the planks over. It was a sort of clarion call to get down to business. The term that followed this was ‘Nap de Killi’ which meant turn on the tap. Hence, these two terms are used together - “chak de phatte, nap de killi”. So there ends my small dissertation on Punjabi folklore (must admit I have never been to the fields of Punjab to hear this).

And a third, which attributes the origin to bhangra bands in the UK:

‘Phatte’ is also synonymous with wooden floor boards. So when desi bands in the UK needed a cool phrase to hook their music (bhangra) on, they used a literal translation of ‘beat up the floor boards’ or chak de phatte.

Prince kisses chuddies

Via Yahoo News:

Extolling what he called the 'splendidly unstoppable' South Asian contributions in Britain, Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British crown, told a dinner thrown for 200 Asian guests at Windsor Castle that the word 'chuddie' - Punjabi word for underwear - is here to stay in the English language.

'I must say I am constantly struck by the fact the Britons of every origin in fact share more in common than they think,' Charles said in his speech to the celebrity guests at the gala dinner. 'The sharing of language is a further case in point. The most well-known examples are probably 'bungalow', 'verandah' and, indeed, 'shampoo'. And more recently, 'chuddies' seemed to have crept into the English language - if that is the correct way to put it,' he told guests who included actor-couple Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal, cricketer Saj Mahmood, author Vikram Seth and actor Art Malik.

A day after Hindus anointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Govardhan Brown on Diwali at the House of Commons, Charles' mention of 'chuddies' at Windsor Castle - his mother Elizabeth II's 900-year-old official residence - risked lowering the tone of celebrations a bit. But it was an occasion for humour and the British royal made his risque reference fully aware that it was Bhaskar and Syal, the creators of the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, who first put the word 'chuddie' in the lexicon of the evolving English language. The word became famous after Bhaskar and Syal coined the phrase 'kiss my chuddies' in their serial. And in 2005, it was officially entered into the Collins English Dictionary.

All About G.V. Desani

A comprehensive site dedicated to the author of All About H. Hatterr. The links under 'Talking Points' will lead you to some interesting articles, including a brief note on a theatrical adaptation of Desani's comic masterpiece titled 'Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!'

Twisted Tongues

Ketan Tanna reports on the current trend of 'accent neutralization' ( Freedom from mother tongue, The Times of India, 30 September 2007):

Most Indians speak English with the peculiar sounds of their mother tongues. 'When' often sounds like 'ven' and 'vine' becomes 'wine'. We also tend to speak fast without stretching the vowel sounds. In Orissa and other parts of eastern India, b is freely used for w and v, while across the South, prize sounds like price, and rise sounds like rice. Gujaratis and Rajasthanis make 'wis' out of wish and their 'shirts' are 'sirts'. And a marriage hall is, poignantly or prophetically, "marriage hole". Maharashtrians threaten to become 'voilent' and not violent. And those from MP and UP have a perpetual problem with starting a word with 's' even if they have been to the 'eskool'. There is, however, a cure. And increasingly, Indians are seeking this cure.

In the last few years, it is not just BPO employees who have been learning to speak correctly but also scores of housewives businessmen, senior citizens, middle level executives and many more who cannot be described. They are taking the help of voice trainers to get rid of various flaws in how they speak English.

Meanwhile, there are those who feel that its time western executives learnt their way around Indian accents. Here's Razib Ahmed's 10 Reasons why you should learn an Indian Accent.

(via Many Englishes)

Gloriously Impure and Back in Print

The New York Review of Books will bring G V Desani's All About H Hatterr back into print this month. Please go out and get yourself a copy of this classic immediately. If you need a reason, read the reviews compiled here or this excerpt from Anthony Burgess' introduction:

..it is the language that makes the book, a sort of creative chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks. It is what may be termed Whole Language, in which philosophical terms, the colloquialisms of Calcutta and London, Shakespeareian archaisms, bazaar whinings, quack spiels, references to the Hindu pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation, and shrill babu irritability seethe together. It is not pure English; it is, like the English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling, gloriously impure.

Khaleeji Pidgin

Found on Chez Sinjab, this interesting blog post (Ma'alum, my friend?: The Grammarian's Guide to Khaleeji Pidgin) on the 'Indo-Anglo-Urdu-Arabic mix' spoken in the Gulf.

Of course, there are certain rules to Khaleeji pidgin.

First, certain words must be spoken in certain languages. Greetings, such as sala'am aleykum and sabah al kheir, are always in Arabic. How are you? is usually delievered in Arabic or Hindi. Iuwa, tamam, good, acha and, most importantly, ok are all acceptable ways of saying good. The phrase number one! must always be delivered in English, and with enthusiasm. My friend is perhaps the most popular English phrase, and is to be used liberally. No problem and mafi mushkala are both universally understood, but mafi mukh (no brain) must be spoken in Arabic. Throw in the occasional bas and khalas when ordering food or to show frustration. Then finished it all off with a masala'am for strangers or a yella, bye! for friends.

Another blogger describes the difficulties involved in mastering this mix:

..learning a 'standard' business English version and getting used to a few accents must be easier than learning the local Arabic mix here, which seems like the equivalent of having to master Biblical English, Shakespearian English, Indian English, Brummie, Geordie and a few others.

Lumberdar

शब्‍दों का सफ़र is Ajit Wadnerkar's excellent blog on Hindi word origins. Here's Ajit on the hybrid word lumberdar, formed from the English word ‘number’ with the Persian termination -dar. (For more on the word, see Hobson-Jobson ).

उत्तरभारत में इसे नंबरदार और लंबरदार दोनों तरीके से बोला जाता है। दरअसल इस नाम के पीछे अगर देखें तो प्राचीन भारत की संयुक्त परिवार प्रथा नज़र आती है। निकट संबंधियों के भरे पूरे परिवार की समृद्ध और समझदारी भरी परंपरा अंग्रेजों के शासन संभालने तक सांसे ले रही थी। यह परंपरा सामाजिक सुरक्षा के लिहाज से चाहे बढ़िया थी मगर कुटुम्ब की संयुक्त अधिकार वाली संपत्तियों , ज़मीनों आदि का हिसाब किताब बड़ा
पेचीदा काम था। खासतौर पर सरकार को जब लगान चुकाने की बात सामने आती थी तब इसकी मुश्किलें नज़र आती थीं। मगर सरकार को तो लगान वसूलना ही होता था सो एक व्यस्था बनाई गई जिसके मुताबिक संयुक्त परिवार के एक व्यक्ति विशेष को इस काम के लिए मुकर्रर कर दिया जाता था कि वह सरकारी शुल्क, लगान या अन्य दस्तावेजी कामों के लिए उत्तरदायी होगा। इस पूरी कार्रवाई का नंबर देखर रजिस्ट्रेशन होता था यानी वह व्यक्ति नंबर के ज़रिये रजिस्टर्ड होता इसलिए उसे नंबरदार कहा जाने लगा। वहीं व्यक्ति बाद में समूचे गांव से राजस्व वसूली के लिए भी प्रतिनिधि बनाया जाने लगा।

Entry From Backside

Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English is the title of a new book on Indian English by Binoo K. John.

Backsides have a frontal position in Indian-English. In cluttered, crowded alleys there can be seen the notice “Entry from backside”, a usage not exactly meant as a come-hither line to gays.

Haflong Hindi

The Indian Express reports on the pidgin Hindi that unites tribes living in the North Cachar Hills of Assam. ('In this Assam district, Hindi unites 11 tribes', Indian Express, 10 September, 2007).

“We call it Haflong Hindi,” said former Chairman of Haflong Town Committee Gopinath Gorlosa.

“A century ago, most of the 11 tribes living in the North Cachar Hills could hardly communicate with each other. Today, all of us have a common language, which we call Haflong Hindi,” Gorlosa said. While Gorlosa himself is a Dimasa, all other tribes—Hmar, Kuki, Zeme Naga, Biate, Vaiphei, Hrangkhol, Khelma, Rongmei, Karbi, Jaintiya—use Haflong Hindi to communicate with each other.

When a Dimasa tribal says, “Tumko mairong leke aaya”, one must understand that he means “I have brought some rice for you,” he explains. “Sometimes it is difficult to understand,” points out Anil Kumar Barua, Deputy Commissioner of the district. When one says, “Tum kutta hum khaya,” it means “Your dog has bitten me”. Or when someone says, “Hum agey girega,” it means “please drop me there.”