IMPACT OF ENGLISH ON PUNJABI
Dr. Balvinder Ghotra
Though the
Punjab remained under the British rule from 1849 to 1947 only, Punjabi has been
in constant contact with English in one way or the other ever since the frontiers
of the British Empire in India and those of the Sikh chieftaincies came closer
to each other after the decisive Battle of Buxar in 1764. Considering that the status of Punjabi has
been politically / culturally subservient to English during the best part of
this period of well over two centuries of contact, it is but natural for the
structure of the former to be deeply influenced by that of the latter. This paper attempts to ascertain the nature
and extent of the impact of English on the lexical, phonological and
orthographic systems of Punjabi.
Impact on the Lexical System
The most
conspicuous impact of the contact between the two languages has been in the
form of copying of about 2,300 general (i.e., non-technical) English words by
Punjabi*. This estimate is based on an
extensive fieldwork conducted by me for collecting and authenticating the data
for my doctoral thesis (‘A Study of Some Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of
English Loan-Words in Punjabi’, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, 1997). The number of technical English copied words
in Punjabi is greater than that of general English copied words in Punjabi by
scores of times. This is obvious from
the very fact that an overwhelming majority of the technical terms in use in
Punjabi at present have been copied from the English language.
Another
impact of English on the lexical system of Punjabi appears in the form of
copied blends and copied translations.
It may be mentioned here that while almost all the copied blends have
come into existence in a more or less natural manner, most of the copied
translations have been the result of the conscious efforts of the Department of
Languages, Punjab. It is precisely due
to this reason that whereas copied blend like bus-adda, double-roti, police-chowki,
etc. are frequently used by the Punjabis in their day-to-day speech, the use of
copied translations like mukh-adhyapak (headmaster), prarthna pattar (application), etc.
is generally limited only to official correspondence.
The prolonged
contact between the two languages has also generated quite a large number of
items of code-mixing. In fact, there is
hardly any lexical item of the English language that is out of bounds to a
Punjabi code-mixer. So much so that
every unpremeditated sentence in day-to-day speech of an educated Punjabi is
likely to contain at least one or two English items of code-mixing. As a matter of fact, his speech loses much
of its natural vigour and flow if he is made to shun the English items of
code-mixing altogether.
Impact on the Phonological System
While in most
cases Punjabi has chiselled the non-native elements in the phonology of the
English copied words in accordance with its native genius, it has also adopted
certain features of the English phonology in certain cases. Consequently, the phonological structure of
Punjabi has undergone modifications at both phonemic and syllabic levels.
At the
phonemic level, Punjabi has adopted two of the RP phonemes, namely the vocalic
phonemes in the first syllables of the words setting and college. The phonemic structure of Punjabi has been
affected by English copied words in Punjabi in the following ways. Firstly, the copied words like thrasher,
spray, strike and screen have given four new consonant clusters,
as occurring at the beginning of these words, to the Punjabi phonology. Secondly, with the copying of the English
words like spring, stretcher, fingerprints, a Punjabi syllable can now
contain up to six phonemes in all and up to three marginal phonemes on either
side of the syllable nucleus; earlier, it could contain only up to five
phonemes in all and up to two consonant phonemes on either side of a syllable
peak.
Impact on the Orthographic System
The English
orthography has also affected its Punjabi counterpart to a considerable
extent. In the first place, it was due
to the influence of the English orthography that the word-boundaries in the
Gurmukhi script have come to be marked with a blank space. Earlier, all the words in a line were written
together, that is, without any dividing space and connected by a single
top-line.
The second
impact of English on the Punjabi orthography has been in the form of the
copying of English punctuation marks by Punjabi. Originally, Punjabi orthography did not have any punctuation
marks except a sign indicating the end of a sentence i.e. the full stop. After Punjabi accepted the English
orthographic convention of leaving a blank space after each word, it was realized
that it also needed to adopt the English punctuation marks like comma,
semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, question mark, exclamation mark, inverted
commas and the parenthetic marks for making its written communication more
precise and expressive.
The third
impact of English on the Punjabi orthography is only in the process of
manifesting itself as yet. The Punjabi
orthography has been in dire need of suitable changes in it ever since the
copying of the English vocalic phonemes occurring in the first syllable of the
English copied words like bedroom, college, etc., but no steps have been
taken by the Department of Languages, Punjab to update the Punjabi orthography
to represent the additional phonemes in an unambiguous manner in the Gurmukhi
script. In the absence of any standard
practice for representing these copied phonemes, it is all left to the whims of
the writer to spell the copied words containing these phonemes in the manner he
deems fit. Thus, some Punjabis write
the word bed with the Punjabi diacritic representing the vocalic phoneme
in the GIE pronunciation of the word bade, others write it with the one
representing the vocalic sound in the word dad. Moreover, there are also instances of confusion in
differentiating between the minimal pairs like guess and gas, which are at
present written identically due to the absence of discrete diacritics
representing the vocalic phonemes in these words. The required diacritics can be devised quite easily by slightly
modifying the existing Gurmukhi diacritics for the neighbouring Punjabi
sounds. The problem is only that of
popularising the new diacritics: the Department of Languages, Punjab can use
its resources and authority to do so.
One can only hope that this Department will take necessary steps for enabling
the Gurmukhi script to live up to its reputation of having one-to-one
correspondence between its spellings and sounds.
The foregoing discussion
clearly bears out that English has left a multifaceted mark on the Punjabi
language. As seen above, a number of
modifications undergone by it at the lexical, phonological and orthographic
levels can be traced back to the long and sustained contact that Punjabi has
had with English right since the middle of the eighteenth century. As English has come to acquire the status of
a prestigious second language in most of the Punjabi-speaking areas of the
country, it will continue to enrich the Punjabi language in the days to come as
well.
* In this paper, the metaphor of copying has been used for
the ‘give and take’ of linguistic items between languages as the traditional
metaphor of borrowing is highly misleading.
(see my paper “On Riding the Phenomenon of Borrowing of Misnomers” in
Indian linguistics Vol. 61, 1-4, 2000, pp 9-12.