Pop goes the WORD!

Dispatches from the future of English; sounds yummy,doesn’t it? We took the liberty of borrowing it from Mark Abley’s book,The Prodigal Tongue,and you can bite this one because that’s what English is. A language that’s evolving faster than the Pentium,churning out words every 98 minutes. That’s what the global language monitor’s recording,and in a couple of hours,it will hit the millionth word. Yes,Jai Ho is in the race,and so is Slumdog with a very colourful pair of cuddies and sugary alchopops along with a couple of other worthy contenders. Scrabble’s never been so fun. But that’s not the point now,is it? The point,folks,is that English establishes itself yet again as the true global language. And Paul JJ Payack,president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor on his website,www.languagemonitor.com,is quick to check the trend. It starts with an explosion in word creation whereby English words are being added to the language at the rate of some 14.7 words a day! In what they term as ‘geographic explosion’,some 1.53 billion people now speak English across the globe as a primary,auxiliary,or business language. From a lakh words in Shakespeare’s day to now the official million mark,it calls for a big wow factor. But wait,when does a word become a word? “When new words are created in and by a society,there are softwares that track them,record the usage and then declare them fit to be added in the dictionary. Oxford is one of the major trackers,and with publishers putting a hold on dictionaries due to recession,this is an interesting way to spike the sales,” Dr Deepti Gupta,professor at the Department of English,PU,is otherwise quite elated with the new additions. A teacher of linguistics,she and her students have placed bets on which one will make it. “Jai Ho has a good chance. I feel new words put life into a language else it ends up dead like Sanskrit and Latin. English and Hindi continue to grow with borrowed words,loan words we call them,and they never return them to us,” she laughs. While the last ten years saw a boom of computer ‘lingo’ like yahoo,google,cyberspace,blogosphere,netizen,the current has snatches from the world of entertainment,environment,financial crisis,and India! Aren’t we world famous! Jai Ho,Slumdog,recessionista,chiconomics,zombie banks,financial tsunami,quendy trendy,renewalist,wonderstar,sexting and yes,the Chinese now call it Chinglish,notes the language monitor. In no time,instead of google it you’ll be ‘bing’ it. While Dr Deepti’s ‘lovin’ it,author Madhu Tandon misses the old romanticism to the language. “There was music to the old structure,and now the notes have all changed,” she fears a sad demise to the Shakespearean era,and feels it’ll be overtaken by words that reflect the new times. “But these are more like little slogans and jingles and limit to the time that has created them,” she insists.

The beauty of any language lies in its adaptability,its power to embrace and make it its own,be it ‘fundoo’ that originated in call centre cubicles,a simple spirited jai ho from a film,or those created by writers,thinkers like JRR Tolkien,JK Rowling,wordsmiths and journalists across the globe. “A language grows when it comes in contact with cultures,with people,and English has that resonance about it,a global sweep,” says Rana Nayyar of the Department of English. In the meantime,as we sit tongues untied,borrowing and lending from the world library,we quote Sven Birkerts,“language is soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at out peril.” So jai ho to a roarific verbal globish revolution,so what if it makes ‘noobs’ of us all!