About a year ago on Odisha TV
(OTV), a popular television channel, there was a panel discussion on Odia
language which had just received the classical language status. One of the
panelists spoke in some pious fury in favour of initiating a Suddha Odia Abhijnana (Pure Odia Movement). This may not have
anything to do with the classical phase of the Odia language, but the celebration
event was the right place, he must have thought, to remind everyone that
the language would be in real trouble in not so distant a future, unless using
pure Odia becomes top priority for the Odias. He was concerned with the English-mixed Odia that people freely use these days.Some other articles I read subsequently on the subject expressed the
same concern. However a non-resident Odia expressed a different concern in an Internet
piece, namely that insistence on pure Odia would exclude people like him.
As a non-resident Odia for eleven
months a year, I too felt uneasy. Thousands of non-resident Odias like me have
strong roots in Odisha, have been educated in Odisha, have our parental homes
in villages and cities of Odisha, read Odia newspapers on the Internet and
listen to Odia news and bhajans on TV
channels. But I, like others I know, use mixed Odia in conversation in the above sense. For a
moment I felt low; I felt the panelist almost branded us as linguistic
offenders.
I soon
recovered from that sense of uneasiness and failure and started wondering when
I and for that matter, all my teachers both at high school and college, friends
and colleagues in Odisha during my education and lectureship days did not mix.
Members of the faculty of Odia language and literature copiously mixed English
words while speaking in Odia in informal interaction, but of course they spoke
unmixed Odia in the class and on formal occasions. In urban areas mixed Odia
was not just a phenomenon restricted to the educated class. “Government Press ethara nische champion haba
(Government Press will certainly become Champions (in Cuttack Football League)
this time)” was not an utterance restricted to any particular class of the football
crazy people of Cuttack in the late fifties and early sixties. Now of course go wherever you like, towns and
cities and villages too, you find people speaking mixed Odia. One feels that
these English words are now a part of the Odia language. And come to think of it,
where in the visible India people speak unmixed language these days?
It is and has
been different in the case of the written language, be it Odia or any other. Talking
about Odia, except in plays and conversation in fiction where the writer tries
to capture natural speech, English words are not used often. And in these
texts the English words are generally written in Odia script. There is always
that gap between natural speech and written language, which is edited and
refined, and to that extent, constructed language. But if this is the situation
in written Odia, what would Pure Odia Movement target? Odia speech?
I do not think
ordinarily people really like to mix. Does anyone mix while singing a bhajan (prayer) to Lord Jagannath? Would
a mixed bhjan be accepted by the
Odias? Barring exceptional cases where one might be mixing either to show off (there
were a few in my college days in the late fifties and early sixties but these
days no one is likely to be impressed) or to make fun of someone’s linguistic
habits, etc. people mix when they feel there is a communicative need. They use
English words when there is a “lexical gap” in their own language with respect
to those words, to use the language of the linguists; that is when their own
language does not have popular words for the non-native words that they use, as
sat (shot) and pas (pass) in sat kahinki marilu, pas deluni (Why did you shoot (literally, kick a shot) instead of
passing) in the context of a game of football. Often they use mixed language
when the borrowed words have become almost part of their language because of
wide use over a period of time, as in e
bisayare diskasan kari ame amara
matamata janaidebu (After having a discussion over this matter, we will let
you know our decision). Odia has more than one word for “discussion”: alochana, perhaps the somewhat less
common charcha or the colloquial
expression katha barta. But these
days many in informal speech tend to use a popular English word in preference
to a tatsma (Sanskritized)
equivalent: niuj peper (news paper)
is more commonly used than sambada patra.
In writing of course everyone would use alochana
or katha batra depending on whether
the discourse is formal or informal. Many English words have become part of
informal talk and the mixed utterances containing such words do not sound odd. For
the lexical gaps in Odia, speakers are not responsible; for various reasons (but
hidden agenda, a charge that is sometimes made against them, is not one of them) our writers and intellectuals have not been
able to create discourse in Odia in many subjects, in particular, the more
technical ones. In any case, as for the speakers, so long as communication
takes place, why worry about whether their utterances are mixed or unmixed? It
is different in the case of writing because writing is not for communication
alone. It is certainly the most important means to get connected with the past.
In any case, all
this is not to say that there is no need for intervention in some form, such as
the Pure Odia Movement. It is a matter of which areas of language this
intervention must target. We must not forget that intervention must not lead to
prescription; that is, it must not be in the following form: it is directed
that such and such structure is grammatical, the rest are not or only a certain
style is acceptable, others are not. The exception to this would be in
the more conservative areas of writing, such as spelling and punctuation.
People are
often casual about spelling, let us hope that the problem of spelling is not
more serious than this. In quite a few sub-episodes of its interesting and
successful programme” niuj feuj (News
Fuse)”, OTV has brought to our attention unacceptable spelling of Odia words,
among other linguistic failures. Spelling and punctuation problems may not excite linguists, but one
must not forget that appropriate punctuation improves intelligibility of the
text and wrong spelling is irritating. These demotivate the reader. Another
area to pay attention to is the use of words. Appropriateness of words, use of
the exact word: “right word in the right place”, as the wise have said. General
sensitivity to words will increase if we have dictionaries of synonyms and
antonyms, descriptions of use of words, not just meanings of words, etc. In this connection, Geoffrey
Leech’s excellent book Meaning and the
English Verb comes to mind. There is nothing equivalent to this in Odia. In sum, we do not have resources like the ones just
mentioned in our language. An initiative like Pure Odia Movement could contribute significantly
to the creation of these and similar valuable resources.
