Further up and Further in

I have a little under 3 months left here, and the way I pick up the speech patterns of the people I'm around, I know I'm going to be made fun of when I return to the States. C'e la vie. What can you do? Maybe if I explain some of the funnier things they say here, I can be prevented from some gross errors when I return.

1. F and P confusion. V and W confusion. Many of the Tamil speakers have trouble hearing/saying the p's when they speak English. Which can be really hilarious, if you imagine some of the things they might say: "Your fant is wery nice" (I'll get to v and w in just a minute). "You already had chicken fox?" "You want to go to a beauty farlor?" "You're a big fig." "Fardon me." "I will say the frayer." "Open to the Fearl of Great Frice" (mormons will understand). "Farting is such sweet sorrow." "My favorite color is fink."
The v and w sounds are also often switched, so we hear things like "Will you be awailable?" or "Your woice is wery nice."

2. Use of "take" and "coming" instead of "give" and more specific verbs. For instance, "I will take class now." "Have you taken food?" "Current is coming." "Smell is coming." "Pain is coming." (Also, something is "paining" instead of "hurting". "Aka, my head is paining.")

3. Using a definite article with names and nouns. "I told to the Kaycee and the Lisa about you." Or the conversation I had with student X two days ago:
"X, you need to be nice!"
"I am the nice!"
"You are not the nice!"

4. "Can't able" instead of "can't" or "not able". "I can't able to understand what you are speaking."

5. Adding "Ah" to the end of a phrase to specify a question. When I first came, I found that after I asked a class a question, I had to tell them that it was a question. In Tamil, the easiest way to turn a word or phrase into a question is to add an 'a' or 'la' to the end of the phrase or last word in the phrase. The kids do it often even when they speak English, and I find myself doing the same thing: "You want to watch a movie-ah?"

A lot of strange things they say come from Indian English, like "Give way" or "Way out" or "Dust bin", "Out of station" (instead of "out-of-town), "lorry" (instead of truck), etc. It's hard to distinguish anymore what's strange and what's not. So I'll leave it at that for now.

You had me laughing my fants off. And I'd almost forgotten about the easy way to form a question in Tamil.

Yes, life is going to be rough when you re-enter the U.S. Imagine my embarrassment when a few months ago, I was talking with a stranger and ended up asking him if such-and-such a town was his native place. Luckily, the din on the bus was enough that I had to repeat the question.

P.S. Nice linguistic analysis; would've scored 10 on a paper in college.

as long as I'm not asking 'fretty flease' I hope I'll get by without too much embarrassment...

Hey, great blog. It gives a fresh perspective. Thanks so much for sharing your views.

(As you rightly suggest in 5.) Most of us here think in our own languages, and then translate that to English, leading to all those funny speech patterns.

In Tamil, it's alright to say 'Naan class edukkaren'. But, translate that to english word by word (Naan = I, class = class, edukkaren = take), it becomes "I will take class." Same with "smell is coming". Naaththam (smell) varudhu(coming) is okay in Tamil.

Raja Rao, a novelist, had this to say about Indian English back in 1938.

One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought- movement that looks maltreated in an alien language . . . yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up . . . but not of our emotional make- up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English.
We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect that will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American.

Ramnath, thanks for your comments.
I think the distinctive Indian English voice coming from the Tamils that will be the most interesting must come from those who learn English almost as well as their own language. The people who commit most of the errors I named are those who have a pretty cursory knowledge of English.
The kids at the school we're teaching at love making Tamil/English word splices. The more I learn Tamil, the better I understand what the kids (and teachers) are trying to communicate in English.

That was a very interesting blog. Chennai is my home town , but most of the things which u pointed weren't all that obvious to me for i grew up listening to them ...

there are other favourite indian english bloopers like
"Form a Straight circle"
"I have 2 daughters both are girls"
etc..