English as a World Language

Language is the medium by which a person communicates his thoughts and feelings to his fellow men. It is the tool, with which he conducts his business in the society. It is a vehicle, by which different subject matters are transmitted. A person must know something of the structure of his language, its position in the world and its relation to other tongues. A language lives in a society so long as people speak it and use it as their native tongue. A language is important because the people who speak it are important -- politically, socially, commercially, economically and culturally. Importance of English language is doubtlessly great.

According to A. C. Baugh, “In the number who speaks it (English Language), is the largest of the Occidental language.” English speaking people constitute merely one tenth of the population of the world. The number is increasing day by day. The English language holds a very prominent position in the world today. It is not merely the language of the English people but it is extensive in different country in Asia, Africa and Oceania and it is the language of the U.S.A, the most powerful nation today. In fact over 350 million speak in this language. If we consider spoken variety of language in terms of comparison we can formulate the following table:

Languages	Speaker
Chinese (Mandarin)	1113 million
English	350 million
Russian	150 million
Spanish	140 million
German	95 million
Portuguese	65 million
French	65 million
Italian	50 million

                               

                                This data is taken form Christopher Harris's The Global Tongue.

The cosmopolitan character of the English language is an undoubted asset for it to attain international uses. It holds a very important position in the world for more than one reason. It is not merely the language of English people but spoken daily by several hundreds of millions in four continents. As a matter of fact English language is being used in all the spheres of life, geographically from a tiny island of folk land to the vast land of Australia.

According to Cohen (2000, p.2), the dominance of American popular culture has influenced many young Europeans who aspire to the "unfettered, dynamic, creative culture of California" rather than the "rigidity" of many European societies. Volkwagon in Germany called their car the "new beetle" rather than the German equivalent neuer Kafer because advertisers believed it sounded more "hip". Similarly in Asia, English is associated with the glamour of block-buster movies and the pop industry.

English language is used internationally as “a library language”- through which journals and magazines are written for the purpose of research and higher learning study. The popular print media is infested with the English language as the “lingua franca.”  

The English language possesses a rare vitality and there is not the least doubt about its further popularity. It is hoped that English language someday becomes the only language of the world or at least to the highly civilised portion. The vitality of English language is the mark of growth. Prof R. E Zachrison of the University of Uppsala declares “Among national languages English has the strongest claim. It is spoken regularly by several hundreds of millions in four continents, and is the official governing language of many more. It is taught as a compulsory subject in most of the higher schools in Europe and in numerous schools in Asia. For simplicity of grammar and a cosmopolitan vocabulary, it has no rival among living language.” Its other related virtues like flexibility are highly commendable.

Although English language is classified as a Teutonic language, more than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of the borrowing of the language have been directed a great many through French, Greek, Italian, Scandinavian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and other prominent languages in the world. The remarkable thing is the assimilation of these heterogeneous elements. Otto Jespersen in his book Growth and Development of English Language put emphasis on the omnivorousness of English language. John Galsworthy, the famous dramatist has remarked, “Any impartial scrutiny made at this moment of time must place English at the head of all language...”

According to Crystal, (1987, cited in Pennycook, 1994, p.8) "English is used as an official or semi-official language in over 60 countries…it is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science, technology, medicine, internet, sports, international competitions, pop music and advertising…". It is the working language of ASEAN, the Asian trade group, and the official language of the European Central Bank, even though none of the member countries has English as its first language (Wallraff 2000, p.3). The extensive economic power of the United States has also influenced many countries to view English as the "key to economic empowerment" (Guardian weekly 2000, p2).

Finally, in a world of rapid technological change and increasing political instability it is difficult to predict what the future may hold. Even today, it is in full vague in the world by its territorial controls, and in near future, let us hope so, it will be the language of the world, since “wish is father to the thought.”

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Salman Rushdie and his "Midnight's Children"

 Key Notes to Remember

Title of the Composition:  Midnight’s Children

Author: Salman Rushdie

Type of work: Novel

Genre: Bildungsroman; satire; farce; magic realism

Language: English

Time and Place Writing: England, late 1970s and early 1980s

Date First Appeared: 1981

Publisher: Penguin Books (Jonathan Cape)

Narrator: Saleem Sinai

Point of View: This novel is narrated in the first person. The narrator is subjective, though he claims omniscience as he speculates on the motives and thoughts of all the major characters

Tone: Urgent; ironic; satirical

Tense: Saleem, age thirty, generally narrates in the present tense. Most of the events he describes, however, occur in the past, at which point Saleem switches to the past tense.

Setting (time):  From 1915 to 1977

Setting (place): India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Protagonist: Saleem Sinai

Major Conflict: The battle between Saleem, who represents creation, and his archrival, Shiva, who represents destruction, encapsulates the major conflicts of the novel.

Rising Action: The birth of Parvati and Shiva’s son, which occurs at the same moment that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares a State of Emergency.

Climax: Shiva and the army’s destruction of the magicians’ ghetto, where Saleem has been living with his wife and her son

Falling Action: After his home is destroyed and his wife is killed, Saleem is taken to the Widow’s hostel, where heand the rest of the midnight’s children are sterilized.

Themes: The single and the many; truth of memory and narrative; destruction vs. creation

Motifs: Snakes; leaking; fragmentation

Symbols: Silver spittoon; the perforated sheet; knees and nose

Foreshadowing: Ramram’s prophesy of Saleem’s birth; Saleem’s fever induced dream of the Widow.

Context

Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947, to an affluent family in Bombay, India. Rushdie’s birth coincided with a particularly important moment in Indian history: after nearly one hundred years of colonial rule, the British occupation of the South Asian subcontinent was coming to an end. Almost exactly three months after Rushdie’s birth, Pakistan and India achieved their long-awaited independence when, at the stroke of midnight on August 14 and 15, respectively, power was transferred from Great Britain to the sovereign governments of each country. The period that immediately followed independence proved tumultuous. Political and social tensions between Hindus and Muslims caused not only the division of India into two separate countries—a calamitous event referred to as Partition—but also wide-scale riots that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The violence that accompanied independence was a prelude to the multiple wars, coups, and governmental abuses that plagued the area in the years that followed.

The political upheaval and constant threat of violence that marked the first three decades of independence forms the backdrop for Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s most celebrated novel. Like Rushdie himself, Saleem, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, is born on the eve of independence, and the events of his life closely parallel events in the development of both India and Pakistan. Most of Rushdie’s novels concern themselves, to some extent, with the character and history of these two major South Asian nations and describe the various, often violent struggles between different religions, classes, languages, and geographical regions. In the thirty years following independence, India and Pakistan fought three separate wars: two over Kashmir, and one over the creation of an independent Bangladesh. The wars produced millions of refugees, claimed thousands of lives, and led to a nearly permanent state of tension between the two countries.

Raised in a well-to-do Muslim household, Rushdie was given an excellent education. After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1968, he moved briefly to Pakistan, where his family had immigrated after Partition, before returning to England to work as an actor and copywriter. Soon after, Rushdie published his first novel, Grimus (1975). A blend of science and literary fiction, Grimus, though generally ignored by critics, nonetheless marked the debut of a new literary talent that incorporated myth, magic, and fantasy into his narratives. Six years later, Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, and was later deemed the best Booker-winning novel from the first twenty-five years of the competition, earning the title “Booker of Bookers.” Heralded by critics as an enormous literary achievement, the novel instantly earned Rushdie comparison with some of the world’s greatest contemporary writers. However, Rushdie’s great international fame is mainly owed to his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and the controversy that followed its publication. Muslim religious clerics and politicians deemed The Satanic Verses sacrilegious and offensive for its harsh, critical portrayal of Islam and for its less-than-reverent treatment of the Prophet Mohammed. The novel was banned in Rushdie’s native India and prompted the theocratic Iranian government to issue a fatwa—a religious ruling—calling for his death in 1989.

Rushdie spent the next nine years living in secrecy, under the protection of bodyguards and the British government. Fearful for his life, Rushdie nonetheless continued to write and publish books, most notably Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and the Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), as well as two works of nonfiction, The Jaguar Smile (1987) and Imaginary Homelands (1991). When the Iranian government lifted the fatwa in 1998, Rushdie was able to enjoy a return to a moderately normal life and eventually settled in New York City.

Rushdie’s work, and Midnight’s Children in particular, is often associated with several categories of literary fiction, including magical realism, postcolonial fiction, and postmodern literature. His work is often compared to, and admittedly influenced by, novels like Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Equally significant as the incorporation of mythical and fantastical elements into his fiction is Rushdie’s uniquely Indian perspective on the English language. Rushdie’s novels hum with an eclectic mix of prose styles, which echo the rhythm and slang of English as it is colloquially spoken in India. Familiar English words get combined in new and unusual ways, and long, unbroken sentences run on freely, sometimes spanning a page or more. The inspiration Rushdie draws from both ancient and contemporary Indian culture is also notable in his fiction. Elements taken from traditional Indian mythology and religion thread themselves through the novel, as do the artistic conventions of modern Bollywood, the vigorous, populist cinema industry based in Bombay. In its sheer exuberance and sprawling range of cultural sources, as well as its attempt to include as much of India’s vast cultural identity and contemporary history as possible, Midnight’s Children is as complete a reflection of the life and character of the subcontinent as any single novel could possibly provide.

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Download E-Book of Dicken's Monumental Novel "Oliver Twist"

Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by Charles Dickens, and was first published as a serial 1837–9. Wikipedia

Originally published: February 1837

Author: Charles Dickens

Genres: Novel

Publisher: Richard Bentley

Characters: Fagin, Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes, Nancy, Oliver Twist, more

Adaptations: Oliver! (1968), Oliver Twist (2005),

Book Review  

Like most of Dickens’s works, Oliver Twist is a novel that encompasses many genres. It is a novel that talks about serious issues, it is a mystery story, and some chapters can even seem to belong to horror-fiction. The plot of the story, extremely famous and familiar to many, revolves around the life of a young orphan boy named Oliver, who embodies saint-like purity and incorruptibility. He falls into the hands of an evil thief-trainer called Fagin and his gang of petty criminals. Oliver faces many obstacles and lives through many horrors throughout the novel.

Dickens’s writings are always political and social commentaries. They provide a powerful insight into the social injustices and the political oppressions that the poor people were subjected to in the England of the nineteenth century. Oliver Twist began to be published in a magazine in the year 1837 under Dickens’s pseudonym, Boz. It was the author’s second novel. It is a vehement protest against the Poor Law of 1834 – the main function of this law was to punish the poor for being poor and ensure that they never could rise out of their poverty. Oliver Twist is a ruthless satire; it effectively pierces the middle class’s veil of complacency and snobbery and reveals the hypocrisies that plague society. Though the novel deals with the England of the Industrial Revolution, it is as valuable a political critique today as it was during Dickens’s own lifetime.

Oliver does not always come across as a very real person, but at certain points one can identify with him completely. Every day we see young children, orphans or otherwise, being exploited and ill-treated. But we are mostly immune to pangs of guilt or pain. Oliver Twist gives voice to the people who are perpetually ignored and forgotten. For the space of the novel we can see society from their perspective.

 

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