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 LONDON: "Kiss my chuddies, gora, we're off to see a fillum, innit". In other words, we're off to the movies and you can kiss my arse if you don't like it. This, then is the chutney tongue, with its curried vowel sounds and Hindi-ised pronunciation, which is spreading like the common cold from British Asian youth to Afro-Caribbean peer groups and on to mainstream English.
Today Britain. Tomorrow, who knows, the world, shrug linguists at Europe's premier conference on language (which ends Saturday, April 3) at Newcastle University in the north-east of England.
Arfaan Khan, the British Pakistani linguist who originally uncovered the existence of a whole new ethnic linguistic group imported from the Indian sub-continent, told STOI, the linguistic khichdi could go one step further and garnish a separate tongue.
Over time, he says, a whole new dialect called British Asian English could come up, which runs a fabulous parallel course to the feisty and faddish Black American vernacular.
Fast forward a bit further and British Asian English could even change linguistic practices in India just as the immigrant dialect called London Jamaican infected the whole world in the '80s with the desire to say "man" to signify modernspeak.
Some analysts say the linguistic churning, which is forcibly spawning a new breed of English from out of the languages of the Raj, is hardly unusual because language has always evolved.
But Khan insists the millennial linguistic melting pot, with its Asian spice, is new and bubbling along furiously.
"British Asian adolescents may sound more British than Indians in India but they just don't sound as British as their white counterparts", he says.
Instead, Britain's second-generation Indians persist in sounding quite like their first-generation immigrant parents. They pronounce ordinary English words like "goat", "kill" and "face" in a recognisably Indian way, says Khan and they never go to see a film. To British Asians, it's always a "fillum".
And they pepper their English with Indian words such as "gora" and "chuddies", all of which are "lexical items" that maintain a distinct Asian cultural identity.
Adds senior linguist, Dr Paul Kerswill of Reading University, "young people, particularly teenagers have an English which is identifiably Asian".
Interestingly, it is less a forced marriage of linguistic cultures than a style statement, says Kerswill. "Youths of Indian origin think it is a fashionable way of speaking, in order to form part of a tightly-knit peer group".
It's happening, innit?
(Times Of India)
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