The common tongue of twenty-first-century London

Schoolchildren in the British capital have developed a dialect, Multicultural London English—and my American-born son is learning it.

In the summer of 2018, my family moved to London, the city of my birth, from New York, my home for three decades. We wanted to be closer to my mother as she neared the age of ninety, and my husband and I were eager to expand the horizons of our son, who had just turned thirteen. My parents had moved to Weymouth, on the southern English coast, when I was just three years old, and so London was unfamiliar to me. Acquainting myself anew with the city, I walked its streets and visited its parks and museums with an exhilarating sense of novelty.

Not long after my family settled into a new home, near Hampstead Heath, I went south to the Tate Britain museum, on the bank of the Thames, to see an ambitious project undertaken by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. He had made a collective portrait of London by photographing its Year Three students—second grade, in the British system. All the city’s elementary schools—public, private, faith-based, special-needs—were invited to participate, and more than fifteen hundred of them agreed to have photographers deputized by McQueen take a class picture. The result, called “Year 3,” is an assemblage of more than three thousand images, featuring seventy-six thousand children.

“Year 3” was overwhelming in scale. Individually framed, and mounted on white, the photographs were stacked wall to wall, a dozen high, in the museum’s lofty Duveen Galleries. From a distance, the regular arrangement of brightly colored rectangles looked like the board of a children’s game. Close up, each rectangle resolved into a traditional class portrait, with the tallest children standing in the back row, and the smallest sitting cross-legged in the front. Many students wore school uniforms—blue blazers and gray shorts, gingham dresses and red cardigans—the outfits barely changed from those my mother wore when she went off to grammar school, or those I wore when it was my turn to enter the British equivalent of kindergarten.

I wished that my mother, who still lives in Weymouth, could have accompanied me, as she would have found the children as irresistibly appealing as I did, with their broad grins showing teeth that are still jostling into position: a boy in a soccer uniform, with a soccer-player haircut, cropped on the sides and long on top; a girl in a green hijab next to a girl with a white satin hairband. Aged seven or eight, they are on the cusp of an understanding of the world, and of their place as individuals in it. Though the project must have been logistically difficult, with all the paperwork and the permissions and the persuasion, it offered a brilliantly simple conceit: displaying the heterogeneity—class, race, nationality, faith—of young Londoners at the age when they first develop an awareness of their own differences, and of the structures that bring them together or keep them apart.

The museum was full of lively children scampering from one side of the gallery to the other, pointing at the images and chattering about the faces on the walls. An essential element of “Year 3” was that all the classes who sat for McQueen’s photographers had the opportunity to come in to see themselves represented. You are the future of London, museum staffers told the students when they arrived—hundreds of them every day. Some of the children had never been to a museum. One purpose of the project was to instill in them the sense that the institution belongs to them, and not just to people like me, a middle-aged ticket buyer overhearing their squealed reactions: Look at this boy, picking his nose! Look, here are children with disabilities, in wheelchairs. Look, these children have a dog with them, a mascot—lucky them.

An essential element of “Year 3” was that all the classes who sat for McQueen’s photographers had the opportunity to come to the Tate Britain to see themselves represented.Photograph © Steve McQueen and Tate / Courtesy Steve McQueen / Thomas Dane Gallery / Marian Goodman Gallery

London itself belongs to these students, whose parents and grandparents have come from all over. More than three hundred different languages are spoken by the children who attend London’s schools, but, as I listened to their voices at the Tate, I was struck by how similar to one another they sound. Sociolinguists who study the way that Londoners speak have identified the emergence, since the late nineteen-nineties, of a new variant of English among the younger generations: M.L.E., or Multicultural London English.

In recent decades, large-scale studies have been undertaken of language use in Hackney, in East London. Historically, Hackney was occupied by white working-class residents, or Cockneys, whose basic elements of speech are familiar not just to Londoners who grew up with them but to anyone who has watched Dick Van Dyke effortfully twist his tongue in “Mary Poppins”—saying wiv for “with” and ’ouse for “house.” The years after the Second World War brought an influx of immigration that resulted in Hackney becoming one of London’s most decisively multiethnic neighborhoods. In one cohort of Hackney five-year-olds, who were studied between 2004 and 2010, there were Cockneys, but there were many more children with parents from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Albania, Turkey, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and various African countries. Friendship groups were multiethnic, the researchers noted, and often included children who spoke a language other than English at home, or children whose first language was English of a postcolonial variety, such as Ghanaian or Indian English. In this diverse milieu, the children found their way to a new common language.

Speakers of M.L.E. use notably different pronunciations from speakers of Cockney: “face,” which in Cockney sounds like fay-eece, for example, slides closer to fess. (In linguistic terms, the Cockney diphthong is replaced by a near-monophthong.) Some of M.L.E.’s features are lexical, with vocabulary especially influenced by the language spoken by people with Jamaican backgrounds—one of the first postwar immigrant groups to arrive in the East End. But the shifts in the language of London amount to more than the borrowing of vocabulary or changes in pronunciation: there are structural changes, too. David Hall, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London, has written of the organic emergence of a new pronoun, “man,” which, depending on its context, can mean “I” or “me” or “him” or “them.” As an example of generic-impersonal use, Hall gives the example “Man’s gotta work hard to do well these days.” To describe the second-person use, he cites a command that might be issued to an upset friend: “Man needs to calm down!” I asked Hall to meet me in a café in Mile End, in East London, not far from the university. Over coffee, Hall—who is young and bearded, and uses many features of M.L.E. in his speech—discussed other attributes of the linguistic variant, such as the dropping of prepositions with the verbs “go” and “come” in certain contexts.

“It has to be some sort of familiar or institutional goal, like ‘I went pub last night,’ or ‘I went chicken shop,’ ” he told me. “It can’t be ‘I went art gallery.’ ”

This is a feature that M.L.E. has in common with modern Greek, he said, but it’s hard to tell precisely in which foreign languages the novelties of M.L.E. are rooted, because it has emerged from such variegated and fertile ground. “It is difficult to say if there is a direct influence from Nigerian English, or Jamaican Creole, because they are all in the mix somewhere,” Hall explained. Moreover, the London children whom Hall and other scholars have studied are influenced more strongly by the phonologies of their peers than by those of their caregivers. Starting at four or five years old, they pool a set of languages and linguistic features, and settle on some subset of that pool as their common language. They begin to speak like one another instead of like their parents. “Normally, kids, until they are eight or nine, will copy their caregivers, and then they will match the community afterwards,” Hall told me. “But these kids are doing it very, very young. It is language change not from the outside but from the inside—they are building it themselves.”

If McQueen’s cameras had captured the chatter of the Year Three students as they shuffled into place and smiled, M.L.E. is one language that nearly all of them would have been familiar with. Hall explained to me that, when groups who speak in different ways come into frequent contact, people often shift the way they speak, eventually sharing speech styles and modes of pronunciation. If you have an extremely mixed group—one whose members speak, say, ten different languages—speakers will settle on linguistic features that allow them to do what they most want to do, which is communicate. “Ultimately, people want to sound like one another,” Hall told me. Linguists use the term “accommodation” to describe the way that individuals change how they speak to align with one another. “It’s not cultural appropriation, it’s not rude, it’s just what we do,” Hall said. We accommodate ourselves to others’ speech because we want to get along; we want to understand, and to be understood.

Soon after my son enrolled at his new school, a few blocks from our house, he started bringing home words and phrases that his new peers, at the onset of adolescence, use to demarcate themselves from their parents, claiming their status as the future of London. The vocabulary was new to his Brooklyn-raised ears, and to me, who had been absent from London for so long. Whenever he brought such words home, I turned them over with him, like fossils found among stones on a pebbly beach. (“Bare,” perplexingly, means “plenty,” or “a lot of.” “Allow it” means “leave it alone.”) Among his classmates are students with English surnames that sound as if they date back to the Norman Conquest or earlier, but there are also children with parents from Somalia, Syria, Bangladesh, Turkey, Poland, France, and Germany. Some of the students arrived in Year Three from Romania, speaking not a word of English; just listen to them now.

For a while, my son was the new outsider, the one who talked funny. Say “aluminum,” his classmates demanded. Say “candy.” Say “elevator.” His American accent was long enough established that it now seems likely to be indelible, though over the past few years he has adjusted to his new context, to fit in. He now says “sweets” instead of “candy,” “maths” instead of “math.” He speaks of his teachers as “Miss” and “Sir,” just as I did—the latter honorific now striking me as peculiar, because I’m hearing it on his democratic American tongue. When my son calls me on his phone after school, to say he’ll be home later than expected, he says, “We’re going shop,” just like his new friends say it—the ones I can hear larking in the background behind him. He used the expression at first with a slight self-consciousness, but in a spirit of openness. Gradually, it has become his default. He is accommodating himself to London, this new city to which he has been translated.

In moving my son between two English-speaking countries, I have not made available to him the opportunity to become fluent in another language. Unlike his classmates with Romanian or Somali or French parents, he cannot move easily and unconsciously between two tongues. But learning to speak like a Londoner is granting him a certain flexibility. I have watched his growing comfort with this new language and am gratified: this expansion of range is, after all, one of the reasons why my husband and I decided to up and move.

When I reflect on the upheaval of moving countries in midlife, I am shocked by what the months of displacement, the anxiety of resettlement, and the disconcerting unfamiliarity of daily life have taken out of me. On a merely practical level, the experience is draining. In so many ways, it would have been easier to stay put. We have voluntarily given up comforts and continuities in favor of choosing a more open-ended prospect. My husband and I told ourselves that we wanted to make a change of our choosing, before unsought change was visited upon us. We chose to get ahead of the instability that we felt was inevitable, by destabilizing ourselves. We hoped and trusted that we would be stimulated by placing ourselves in a new context, that there would be value for us in seeing the world from a new vantage point.

But we knew, too, that there would be costs to our choice, and that moving would demand of us a reckoning with loss. The closer I am to my mother, from whom I was distant for so long, the farther I am from my beloved American family: my sister-in-law, my brothers-in-law, my husband’s three adult sons. Indeed, we learned of the impending birth of our first grandchild only after we had moved to London, when my husband’s oldest son called and we put him on speakerphone, his voice sounding thrilled and proud as we looked out of the window toward a garden wall along which a red fox creeps at twilight.

But my midlife is my son’s youth, and the move has already shown him that the world is wider than it would have appeared to him had we never strayed from our old neighborhood, in brownstone Brooklyn, with its scrappy basketball courts around the corner; its friendly, progressive middle school and its constantly inflating property prices; its coffee shop where, on the sidewalks outside, dogs slurp at aluminum bowls of water while their owners stand in line waiting for their own carefully crafted refreshments. I have seen teen-agers grow up in New York, and I know how the competitiveness of the city—the urgency and drive and self-importance of it, the characteristics that so thrilled me as an ambitious new arrival in my early twenties—can leave a young person feeling defeated before she has begun. I have seen, alternatively, how New York can make a young person believe that there is no other place in the world significant enough to matter. I want to inoculate my son against such provincialism. I want to nurture his native cosmopolitanism.

I go to a party at the home of a new acquaintance, in Central London. It’s like being transported back to a party from the eighties, the decade in which I first left England behind. Everyone is drinking whatever gets put into their hands. Everyone is smoking cigarettes that will leave my hair reeking by night’s end. There is urgent, shouted conversation about art and politics and history. I fall into conversation with a woman, a filmmaker with some recent success. Reflexively, I explain my relocation. I cannot bear to be taken for just another Londoner—someone who never left and made a life elsewhere, though my British accent remains intact, belying my thirty years away, my American passport, my American fidelities.

I tell the filmmaker that I want my son to grow up with the ability to move comfortably among countries, continents, worlds. You want to turn your son into an Englishman, she replies, with a note of apparent satisfaction at having found such a neat formulation. God, no, I reply, surprising myself with my vehemence. That’s the very last thing I want to do. My son is a complete American, born a New Yorker as the summer dawn broke over the East River, its rising red disk visible from the hospital bed in which I first held him in amazement. My son, blessed in childhood with a cheerful temperament, has what I think of as an American’s optimism and an American’s openness, even though he has been raised and loved by an English mother with her English instincts for repression and regret.

Those instincts may account for the aspects of my decision to move that I find hardest to explain to a stranger, or to anyone: the sense that I wanted to dislocate my son so that he would know what it is to yearn for elsewhere. I did not bring him to England in the hope of bequeathing on him an alternative national identity as an Englishman. My ambivalence about this chilly, moated island nation does not accommodate that fantasy of homecoming. I have known many city dwellers whose affection for the structures of their own childhood is so great that, upon becoming parents, they wish to replicate them, and thus yearn to move to the country or to the suburbs. I do not share this longing. Though I am delighted by the pleasures of introducing my son to the landscape of my childhood—to have him bounce on the same seafront trampolines as I did, and race along the same cliffside slopes—there is no sense in which I want to reduce his world to the narrowness of that from which I came.

What I do want to grant him from my own childhood experience is the corollary of that narrowness. I want to cultivate in him a sense of ambition and a quest to roam—attributes that, in my own adolescent experience, were nurtured by a sense of never quite feeling at home in my home.

By uprooting my son just as he was about to begin applying to high schools, I placed his childhood definitively within one retrospective landscape and offered him an unknown vista for his adolescence. I am excited for what this new territory will offer him. London is a good place to be a teen-ager, friends old and new have told me—there’s a freedom offered by the city, with its sprawling streets and generous parks, its network of tubes and buses, its intersecting social circles. These days, I often walk past high-spirited gatherings of kids on Hampstead Heath—lounging on blankets with bottles of drinks that they aren’t old enough to buy, playing music on loudspeakers that they aren’t supposed to use here—and their vitality delights me. Their pleasures seem almost Arcadian; these hours whiled away in urban fields under open skies display a liberty that seems to me both wilder and more innocent than that offered by the sophisticated constraints of life in New York City. I want my son to have access to that range and freedom and sense of ownership. I want him to get to know London like a new language that he’s mastered while his tongue is still flexible. But there’s something else that motivates me. A sense of displacement is so constitutional to my own being that I seem to have been compelled to make it my son’s inheritance. I have given him this questionable gift: a lost place to long for.

(Source: The New Yorker)

What “Isle of Dogs” gets right about Japan

A week ago, I saw Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” or “Inu-ga-shima.” I saw it as someone who, upon hearing that name, is forcibly reminded of Oni-ga-shima, the isle of demons where Peach Boy, a hero of Japanese folklore, fights evil with his canine band of brothers. In the first grade, I was cast in a school production, in Tokyo, as one of the demons. The role required red face paint and Sharpie horns and growl-prancing, and I was as terrifying as a four-foot Japanese Caliban could be. This is all to say that I watched “Isle of Dogs” as a Japanese person—as someone who was born in Japan, who spent my childhood and adolescence there, and who looks and speaks and reads and eats like a native.

I saw the movie in New York. I arrived early. As I waited, I read critiques of the film, which is set in the fictional city of Megasaki, and which follows a group of dogs, and one or two humans, after the mayor banishes all canines to nearby Trash Island. The dogs speak English; the humans, for the most part, speak Japanese, which is often but not always translated. Reading the reviews, I found that there were some familiar gripes: the film Orientalized, it Othered, it had a white-savior narrative, it rendered Japanese people flat and mysterious and inscrutable, and it was part of a grand old Euro-American tradition of white men plundering Japanese aesthetics for their art. I put on my headphones and listened to a Slate interview in which a critic, Inkoo Kang, responded to the movie with a “first reaction: Yuck. Second reaction: Yawn.”

The movie began. The Japanese characters started speaking, without subtitles, and suddenly, in a Loews in Lincoln Square, surrounded by a sea of Americans inhaling corgi-sized tubs of popcorn, I was hearing voices from home. 

They were neither inscrutable nor flat. They were Japanese, in various shades of age and talent and fame. I heard Mari Natsuki—better known Stateside as the voice of Yubaba, from “Spirited Away”—in the host mother who dresses down an overexcited white girl: “Be quiet, go to sleep, I don’t care about your newspaper, just go to sleep.” I strained to place a TV-news anchor’s voice until, yes: it was the lead singer of the teen-rock band Radwimps, who’d starred in a mixtape that my first boyfriend had given me, in a brown paper bag, in front of Shibuya Station, more than a decade ago.

To say that the Wes Anderson film dehumanizes the Japanese is to assume the primacy of an English-speaking audience. Photograph by Fox Searchlight Pictures / Everett

Even when the voices weren’t familiar, they were distinct. Someone—if not Anderson, then perhaps the actor Kunichi Nomura, who co-wrote the film—cared enough to insure that the voices sounded pitch-perfect as types. A scientist, presenting her findings on snout flu, spoke with the bored, clipped tone of every ponytailed researcher on Japanese daytime TV. In a scene that must’ve seemed an incoherent buzz to non-Japanese viewers, a doctor interrupts another’s hushed importance during surgery with an equally serious “Gauze!”—a deadpan, bull’s-eye rendition of “Iryu,” the Japanese version of “ER.” No one else in the theatre got it, but I couldn’t contain my laughter.

As the film progressed, I picked up cues hidden from the rest of the audience. At one point, the dogs leapt on a trolley that read “Trash: For Compression and Crushing” in faint white kanji. Mayor Kobayashi’s propaganda poster—“For the Greater Good of Megasaki City”—was a playful riff on “For the Greater Good of Children,” a principle upheld in Japanese courts to protect kids against negligent parents. (That it was being used as a campaign slogan was, of course, ironic, given that Kobayashi was deporting his ward’s pet.) And then there were the gags: Atari, the ward in question, washes the dog Chief in a tub-sized can labelled “Hokusai Beer.” When the credits rolled, the staggering number of kanji characters—of Japanese people involved in making the film—lit the screen brightly for seconds and seconds.

As I walked out of the theatre, Anderson’s decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers struck me as a carefully considered artistic choice. “Isle of Dogs” is profoundly interested in the humor and fallibility of translation. This is established early, by the title card: “The humans in this film speak only in their native tongue (occasionally translated by bilingual interpreter, foreign exchange student, and electronic device). The dogs’ barks are translated into English.” 

From the start, Anderson points to the various and suspect ways in which translation occurs. Official Interpreter Nelson, voiced by Frances McDormand, works for the government, but her reliability is thrown into doubt when she starts inserting her own comments—“Holy Moses!”;“Boy, what a night!”—while on the job. In one scene, she’s casually replaced by a little boy. The simul-talk devices, meanwhile, are shown to be operated by shadowy men in white starched shirts. This is the beating heart of the film: there is no such thing as “true” translation. Everything is interpreted. Translation is malleable and implicated, always, by systems of power

This theme persists throughout the film, especially in the character of Tracy Walker, the foreign-exchange student who’s been deemed, in some reviews, as a white savior of sorts. Tracy has a hunch that the government is covering up a mass conspiracy. During a rally she cries, “Not fair!” and stamps up to Kobayashi, demanding that her voice be heard. Kobayashi blinks, then revokes her immigration visa, leaving her in tears. (Notably, the children who provide more than just bluster are Atari and the Japanese hacker from Tracy’s newspaper club, both of whom end up saving the day.) If Tracy is a white savior, her role is immediately neutered. What is interesting about the scene is that she speaks to the crowd in English. Both Kobayashi and the crowd understand her words, but respond in Japanese. This was a revelation: in the world of Megasaki City, the Japanese can speak and understand English but choose to speak in their native tongue. They demand fluency on their own terms. At a climactic moment, the movie rejects the notion of universal legibility, placing the onus of interpretation solely upon the American audience.

This is a sly subversion, in which the Japanese evince an agency independent of foreign validation. Indeed, to say that the scene dehumanizes the Japanese is to assume the primacy of an English-speaking audience. Such logic replicates the very tyranny of language that “Isle of Dogs” attempts to erode. Anderson is a white, non-Japanese director, but had he not been interested in the power dynamics behind translation, and instead made a twee fever dream imitating Japanese aesthetics, “Isle of Dogs” would have looked and sounded a lot different. His commitment to showing the daily rhythms of a living, breathing Japanese people reveals itself not only in his cast of twenty-three Japanese actors but in his depictions of how exactly a Japanese TV-news anchor transitions to a new topic (“This is the next news”), what milk cartons for elementary schools look like (labelled “extra-thick”), or how a couple of scientists might celebrate—with a clink, “Yo—oh!,” and a clap. The film invites a kinship with a viewer who will find these banalities familiar, and lets these moments flow by, unnoticed, for those who do not.

This is not to assert the primacy of my own experience with the film. Whenever an Asian-American controversy flares up, whether in regard to whitewashing or appropriation, there’s usually a move, in the media, to ask those in the homeland what they thought—whether they were offended, say, by Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese character. That move implies that being Japanese, and the corresponding right to take offense, are innately tied to growing up there. That the Japanese person usually responds in the negative—of course we’re fine with Scarlett!—speaks only to the fact that Japan is a country with neither ethnic diversity nor a substantial critical race discourse. To be Asian-American, meanwhile, is to develop a brutal familiarity with seeing Asia, and Asian characters, distorted, passivized, and flattened by white hands.

But we might note, when considering “Isle of Dogs,” that the tradition of white men “appropriating” Japanese art was, in large part, aided and abetted by the Japanese. The history of Japonism—of the West’s obsession with Japanese aesthetics—can’t be unwoven from the fact that said obsession served as an efficient, effective distraction as Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula. Kabuki, haiku, woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai—the very forms that are supposedly arrogated by Anderson—were, in some respects, cultural ambassadors that ushered forth imperial expansion. And Japan, too, used language as an oppressing force; in Korea, the imperial government banned the study of Korean and enforced a Japanese-only policy.

Language is power. “Isle of Dogs” knows this. It shows the seams of translation, and demarcates a space that is accessible—and funny—only to Japanese viewers. One of the most potent shots in the film is of graffiti on gray cement. A large black scrawl asks, “Douyatte bokura wo korosu tsumori?” How on earth do you plan on killing us? For most viewers, it’s a mark on the wall. For Japanese ones, it’s a battle cry.

(Source: New Yorker)

Linguist Peggy Mohan's new book tells the story of India through its languages

 "Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages", published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI), is written by noted linguist Peggy Mohan.

A new book delving into the early history of South Asia reveals how migration -- both external and internal -- has shaped both, Indians and Indian languages from ancient times.

"Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages", published by Penguin Random House India (PRHI), is written by noted linguist Peggy Mohan. The book, through an incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, presents the argument that "all Indians are of mixed origins".

".. Hindi, Marathi, all the northern languages we call 'Indo-Aryan': they have words that were taken from the Prakrits and Sanskrit, but the way these words string together is strikingly different. There is another parent in this family that we have been ignoring!," said Mohan, who has also the author of "Jahajin" and "Walk in C-Minor".

"There are so many ways to look at history! Now the languages we speak have much to add to the story told by archeology, the historical record and modern genetics," she added.

Path-breaking in its revelation of the hidden story of Sanskrit, it also explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India's native languages.

"Urdu, too, has a story, starting with men who spoke Uzbek coming to Delhi and finding early Hindi, but preferring to speak Persian, the way so many of us opt for English. The north-east has a separate story too, starting near Banaras, where there is a different history and a totally different ‘maternal’ substratum—no gender, for example.. And English, which took to the Indian landscape like a hardy and determined weed," said the Trinidad-born author.

The book also got high praises from eminent historian Romila Thapar and award-winning journalist-author Tony Joseph.

While Thapar commended the book for revealing new dimensions in aspects of Indian history so "ably and accessibly" in this book, Joseph, who is the author of best-selling "Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors", called the book a "necessary read".

"Peggy Mohan takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the world of Indian languages. Weaving linguistics and history tightly together, she explores how waves of migration over millennia have left their mark on what we speak and how we speak. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants is an accessible account [and] a necessary read," said Joseph about the book. The 360-page "Wanderers, Kings, Merchants", priced at ₹599, is presently available for sale on online and offline stores.

Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages(Penguin)

(Source: HT)

Homeschooling has revealed the absurdity of England’s national curriculum

 My eight-year-old daughter is being called to spot expanded noun phrases. My 11-year-old son fills in checklists of "success criteria." Are we raising children or robots?

In normal times, my cheery “So, how was school?” rarely receives more than a grunted “OK.” But homeschooling is revealing what my children actually do all day. And the discovery has come as a shock.

My 11-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter go to a perfectly decent state primary, which has valiantly provided worksheets week by week throughout our successive lockdowns. But I read them with incredulity, hilarity—and horror.

My daughter is told to improve her writing using “PUGS (Punctuation, Up-levelling, Grammar and Spelling).” (“Up-levelling,” I gather, means “improving.”) Meanwhile, she is left finding comprehension incomprehensible: “Use evidence from the text to justify your thinking!”—the exclamation mark failing to animate the task, which involves describing the appearance and personality of protagonists; or spotting expanded noun phrases. (I kid you not.)

Suspicious, I took out their old exercise books, which I’d shamefully only ever briefly glanced at in the holidays. At the top of each page is an “LI,” which, they informed me after some racking of brains, stands for “learning intention.” 

(Other schools use “learning objectives” or “WALT”—We Are Learning To…). When she was six and seven, my daughter was in the habit of writing her name followed by a row of hearts and kisses. Yet under that charming heading, she’d been made to scrawl such heart-sinking formulas as “LI: to practise inference skills”; “LI: to interpret a pictogram”; “LI: to work systematically to solve a problem”; and “LI: to identify features of a non-chronological report.”

Underneath the “LI” they have to paste in a checklist of “success criteria”: “I can add extra information to my sentence using a subordinate conjunction”; “I can use time adverbials”; “I can include technical vocabulary.” It was as if I’d booked a babysitter but a marketing manager had turned up instead.

The maths worksheets seemed more cogent, but the language was just as weirdly abstract—all tell, no show. “LI: to add using expanded column method”; “LI: to use inverse relationships to solve problems”; “Challenge: how many different division facts will you be able to write for the following statements? Explain your answer.” The wording reminded me of a poorly translated instruction manual.

When Michael Gove instituted a new national curriculum in 2014, the highly technical grammar foisted on primary pupils attracted some consternation (the secondary grammar curriculum is tiny by comparison). Six- and seven-year-olds are now expected to know prepositions, conjunctions and subordinate clauses; eight- and nine-year-olds, noun phrases expanded by the addition of modifying adjectives, preposition phrases, fronted adverbials and determiners; nine- and 10-year-olds, modal verbs and relative pronoun cohesion. I don’t even know what some of these terms mean, and I’ve got a PhD in English.

But there is a bigger problem with our education system, and it is manifest not just in the grammar, but in its entire lexicon. The dismal ingredients listed in the national curriculum are ending up, raw and unprocessed, on my children’s plates. The teachers—who are expected to serve up this extraordinarily detailed menu—have no time to properly prepare it. When an outsider like me suddenly sees what is going on, the obvious question is: why are they spending precious learning time deciphering abstruse terminology that is clearly age-inappropriate, joyless and fundamentally pointless?

Photo: © Rex Shutterstock

The first national curriculum for England and Wales was legislated for by Margaret Thatcher’s education secretary Kenneth Baker in 1988. It began being phased in the following year. Designed to standardise local variation, it was initially stuffed with knowledge but slimmed down by Ron Dearing’s 1994 review. In 2008, after New Labour’s early fixation on the three Rs, Gordon Brown’s government eventually attempted to shift the emphasis towards “life skills,” but this was reversed when the Coalition initiated its own reforms in 2010.

I am something of an educational conservative, and found myself in agreement with Gove’s belief, shaped by his own education at an Aberdeen private school, that children should acquire a rigorous grounding in “literary canons, mathematical proofs, scientific laws, musical exercises and artistic traditions.” In a 2013 speech, Gove surprised many by quoting the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his defence of traditional education against Mussolini’s knowledge-stripping reforms: “Previously pupils at least acquired a certain baggage of concrete facts,” Gramsci wrote. “Now there will no longer be any baggage to put in order.”

Gove also cited the American academic ED Hirsch, who argues that educational conservatism is in reality progressive, as it is “the only means whereby children from disadvantaged homes can secure the knowledge and skills that will enable them to improve their condition.” These children must “master the traditional culture in order to command its rhetoric,” and thereby advance in life. In my view, Gove correctly argued that dethroning the teacher as an authority figure and placing the child alongside them “on the same footing as co-creators of learning” actually ends up reinforcing broader social hierarchies—although his subsequent disparagement of experts means he gets 0 out of 10 for consistency.

Indeed, the whole Govian “reform” project was deeply contradictory: he undermined his own curriculum by allowing academies and free schools to depart from it. Even where it has been stuck to, the “knowledge-based” curriculum has failed on its own terms—why else do my kids stare blankly at an atlas? They are asked to write about topical issues like plastic pollution without understanding the composition of either plastic or the ocean—or even what a fish is.

Part of the problem is that “knowledge” has been incorrectly defined as “grammatical concepts.” Children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce tells me he has done readings in primary schools where the teacher says afterwards: “Now class, let’s identify the wow words, connectives and metaphors that Frank is using here.” This is not the fault of teachers: “I see amazing work all the time,” he says, “but it’s in the teeth of what they’re asked to do—they’re having to gouge moments out of the day and twist the curriculum to be able to do it.”

Cottrell-Boyce believes the value of listening to stories is being missed. “It’s a strange thing for a writer to say,” he tells me, “but I think we really overvalue writing. A lot of the writing that’s done in the classroom is to create some physical entity that can be assessed. It has no intrinsic value apart from the testing—and kids know that.”

Testing leads to everything being “gamed,” he tells me. “Kids are being urged to expand their sentences and add adjectives that their story doesn’t need because they gain points for it; so at some level, the whole process is becoming transactional. And the kids know there’s bad faith in that,” because it’s not really about them. Schools are ranked by SATs performance: “So at the core, we’re teaching cynicism over pleasure. Pleasure is regarded as suspect, to do with fun and distraction—but I think of pleasure as a really profound form of concentration. You will only do something well if you are taking pleasure in it.”

Formal grammar teaching is defended as a remedy for those who do not grow up around books. But Cottrell-Boyce points instead to the “huge inequality” between “kids who experience a book on their mum’s knee or being read to in bed, and kids whose first encounter with a book is decoding this terrifying puzzle on a desk. It’s very hard to get over that hurdle.”

“Why are our children spending time deciphering abstruse terminology that is clearly age-inappropriate, joyless and fundamentally pointless?”

All four academics who advised on the literacy curriculum have since criticised the process as chaotic and rushed. One was Debra Myhill, director of the Centre for Research in Writing at the University of Exeter. “The curriculum as it stands doesn’t necessarily reflect what we recommended,” she tells me. “Our advice was made to fit Conservative ideology”—though she adds that other parties would also interfere, a reason why most countries keep politicians out of it.

Myhill questions the degree to which knowing grammar improves writing. “Some naming of parts gives you a vocabulary to use between you and the teacher, but if that is actually confusing you and getting in the way of your learning, then actually it’s not serving any good purpose.”

There is technical language in all subjects, but it is not the case that grammar is to writing what the periodic table is to chemistry. As linguists Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have shown, children deploy grammar instinctively; they don’t use it as building blocks to construct sentences. They can write “I went to the park and played with my friend” without knowing they’re using a conjunction. Earlier this month, the writer and teacher Kate Clanchy tweeted reassurance to homeschooling parents struggling with fronted adverbials: “Grammar is not ‘the basics’ of language,” she wrote: “it’s the description of how it works.” Even if there could be some application for it as part of language learning or literary criticism somewhere down the road, it is surely consuming disproportionate amounts of time in the primary school classroom.

Clanchy was writing in tribute to her late mother, Joan Clanchy, herself a headteacher and an adviser on the curriculum, until she resigned in 2011 in protest at emerging literacy plans. “It’s as though the driving test just involved doing a three-point turn without taking the driver out in traffic,” Joan commented at the time. “The interest, enjoyment and excitement will go.” Michael Rosen, another prominent critic of grammar teaching divorced from context and function, argues that writing is best learned through “imitation, parody and invention.”

The 2011 curriculum review was led by Tim Oates, an expert in assessment policy and long-term government adviser on curriculums and qualifications. He acknowledges it was done “at speed,” but insists it is “really well grounded in solid international evidence on high-performing education systems.” The results, he says, speak for themselves. According to PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment (itself controversial for its reliance on quantitative testing), “standards have improved in mathematics, and we’ve held steady in reading literacy,” Oates tells me; not exactly a ringing endorsement for all the grammar, but he points out that other countries’ performance has deteriorated.

One of those countries is Finland, often hailed as a paragon of holistic, child-centred education. “There’s a lot of nonsense talked about Finland,” Oates says: its impressive results should be seen in the context of historically high literacy levels in the culture at large, which are now in decline.

Is the narrow focus on grammar and perhaps maths at the expense of basic science, geography and history—let alone music and the arts? Oates acknowledges that “we’ve remained somewhat moribund in science,” for example, but thinks that keeping the initial focus on numeracy and literacy is “sensible. Resources are limited, and we don’t want to burden schools with innovations everywhere.”

One of the curriculum’s guiding principles, Oates says, is making sure children understand each aspect before they progress to the next. So what about the impenetrable vocab? “If you’re talking about ‘language about language’ being acquired mechanistically and superficially without understanding,” he says, “I know that’s occurring in reading and writing, and I don’t support it”—damning words from the man behind the original blueprint.

“There is a lot of content in those Year 5 and Year 6 annexes to English” (for nine- to 11-year-olds), he admits, but adds that “the testing has been, as it were, toned down a bit after the first two years’ experience.” Oates thinks it would be “prudent” to review those annexes. But he is not in favour of revamping the entire curriculum; instead, he’d like to see it implemented better through teacher training and support.

For teachers, however, the issue is not just the curriculum but the entire regime of tests and inspections. “Testing drives teaching,” Myhill tells me. “It is possible to abide completely by what the curriculum is asking while teaching it in a meaningful way, but that takes confidence.” Similarly, while LIs, LOs and WALT originate in the pedagogical principle of conscious learning, “they’ve become redundant, fossilised, formulaic procedures”—in part because they plug so neatly into the evidential framework. “There are a million more appropriate and imaginative ways,” she says.

According to the curriculum’s statement of aims, the “language about language” is “not intended to constrain or restrict teachers’ creativity, but simply to provide the structure on which they can construct exciting lessons.” But over-stretched teachers inevitably stick to the script to avoid leaving boxes unticked.

Carrie Derrick is a Year 5 teacher in Bristol. “They can say all they like about parts of the curriculum being non-statutory, but they may as well be,” she tells me. “Understandably, management wants the best for its school, so if Ofsted asks about whether an aspect of the curriculum is being taught, you teach it.”

Derrick works at an inner-city school with a challenging intake. “Year 6 are essentially cheating,” she says, “getting children to copy pretty much what the teachers write throughout the year for ‘evidence for writing’ [an externally moderated teacher assessment]; and actually every school is doing it that I’ve ever worked in, because everyone is so scared of the bad inspection that will follow a bad SATs result—the fear that you could go into special measures, or be [forcibly] ‘academised.’”

Testing—SATs, but also GCSEs—also explains why so few academies and free schools (or independents for that matter) grab the chance to jettison the jargon. In fact, academy chains are replete with dispiriting acronyms: from DEAR (drop everything and read) to SLANT (Sit up straight, Lean your body towards the speaker, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head “yes” and “no,” Track the speaker with your eyes).

The need for schools, teachers and pupils to make it through the gauntlet of tests means the terminology travels largely undigested through the system: the Year 6 spelling, punctuation and grammar test—referred to by the unlovely term SPaG—has its 11-year-old victims identify “modal verbs,” “determiners” and “co-ordinating conjunctions.”

Denied the chance to operate as autonomous professionals, teachers become hopelessly reliant on an industry that has sprung up to deliver the diktats. Twinkl is the most common provider; its corporate logo adorns my kids’ worksheets. “Help your Year 2 students to understand that addition is commutative using our range of age-appropriate maths activities and worksheets that have been designed specifically to meet the 2014 national curriculum aim,” its website states. Derrick says she’d like to make her own materials that reflect her own character, “but there just isn’t the time.”

I did a double take when I read Ofsted’s chief inspector Amanda Spielman’s criticism of teaching to the test. “We all have to ask ourselves,” she wrote in a 2018 review, “how we have created a situation where second-guessing the test can trump the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding.” If my kids’ tribulations are anything to go by, not much has changed.

If children are only “parroting” knowledge, Oates tells me, “then the constellation of drivers and incentives in the system have not been correctly aligned.” Oates struck me as sensible and humane, but I couldn’t help notice his own use of jargon.

He still believes in testing. In fact, “we need far more assessment, but of a different kind and for a different purpose”: tests that “don’t hold schools to account, but are used to gain insight into what’s going on,” and especially to “identify pupils who are in need of support”—something many teachers would argue is their rightful domain.

“It’s a very long time in this country since we have had real discussions about what we want children to learn and to what purpose,” former adviser Debra Myhill tells me. She would like to see a rethink across the board, not just in literacy. “It used to be a strong field of research in the sixties and seventies. Since 1988, we’ve had curriculum after curriculum, but the design has been shaped by political ideology rather than discussions about what we want education to be for. It is a choice: we as a country decide what we think is important.”

“If I had a magic wand I would reinvent the whole thing,” teacher Carrie Derrick tells me. “I’d give teachers room to be creative, and actually do things that children like doing, and be led more by them and their sheer love of learning, rather than the need to provide evidence. That is why I’m a teacher.” Pendulum swings in education policy sap energy. But we cannot in good faith persist with a system that converts children’s natural curiosity into bafflement, strategising just to “get through,” and ultimately disengagement.

Homeschool has been gruelling. Tactfully ignoring most of the worksheets, my kids and I have learned why limestone foams in vinegar and how a valley is formed, but also what happens to an alarm clock when it is thrown across a room. Explaining how to tell the time was harder than I’d expected.

But it has also revealed what is possible. I will send them back to the classroom with relief on 8th March—but also a heavy heart. School involves an accommodation with the state. It’s basically fine, you tell yourself as you wave them off, bags on backs. It could get even worse, however, if the pandemic produces a doubling down on standards and a rush to plug attainment gaps.

What, though, if things went the other way? If enough parents were to reject what teachers have bemoaned for years, now that they’ve seen it for themselves? If pressure built to the point where all the jargon had to be stripped out and meaningful knowledge added in; if all the futile documentation, testing, inspections and league tables were abandoned and teachers liberated to speak in their own words? That really would be a silver lining.

Eliane Glaser is the author of “Elitism: A Progressive Defence” (Biteback)

(Source: Prospect)

For the love of words, 82-year-old compiles dictionary of 4 south Indian languages

Njattyela Sreedharan is a class 4 dropout who went on to travel, train, read aplenty for 25 years to bring out the dictionary.

Njattyela Sreedharan sat looking at the page in front of him. He had written the words ‘seemantha rekha’ – the Malayalam term for hair parting where some married women apply vermillion. Next to it, he had added the translation in Telugu and Kannada. 

But the Tamil column lay blank. No one he asked seemed to know the Tamil equivalent for ‘seemantha rekha’, including men and women across ages, teachers, and Tamil scrap collectors who came home. Everyone either shrugged off or laughed at him. Finally, months later, a woman who also laughed in the beginning, gave him the term – ‘vakidu’. Thrilled, Sreedharan added it to the fourth column of his page. He just got one more entry for the multilingual Dravidian dictionary he had been preparing for years. The dictionary finally got published this November, 25 years after the 82-year-old began working on it. 

“For 25 years, I travelled and trained and talked to many for the dictionary. But it is in the last 10 years that I sat at one place, without going anywhere, without a social life, to fully focus on writing. Only then could I complete it,” Sreedharan says from his house in Thalassery.  

He also points out that Hermann Gundert, who created the first Malayalam-English dictionary in 1872, was also in Thalassery when he wrote that. “Maybe his spirit entered my body,” Sreedharan jokes.

But unlike Gundert, Sreedharan is no scholar. He dropped out of class four to work in a beedi making company. But he had read books like Sreekrishnacharitham Manipravalam by Kunjan Nambiar and Balaramayanam by Kumaranasan at school. His love for language must have begun around then, Sreedharan reckons.

He went on to read a lot, and as an adult, found a job with the Public Works Department. Nandan, who made a documentary on Sreedharan, says that it was during this time that he got acquainted with Dr TP Sukumaran, a professor at Nirmalagiri College, who gave him the idea of compiling a dictionary, containing colloquial usage of Malayalam words.

Sreedharan had by then become familiar with Tamil, learning it in Palakkad. He decided to train himself in the two other Dravidian languages of Telugu and Kannada before compiling the dictionary.

A Kannada-speaking colleague, Govinda Naik, taught him the language. Sreedharan also took Kannada lessons from writer Raghavan in Kasargod. In Taliparambu, a man from Andhra Pradesh helped him pick up Telugu. But Sreedharan didn't stop there. He made several trips to Mysuru, Mangaluru, Andhra and Tamil Nadu and spoke to the people. He collected words from 20 to 25 dictionaries. He learnt from vernacular newspapers and magazines.

"I read everything from horoscopes to cooking recipes. One must not mock them. You get the most common and useful words from the recipes," Sreedharan says.

The fact that there has still not been a comparative study of the words in the four languages kept Sreedharan, the language lover, going. “A lot of people travel between all these states for work or business. It will be very helpful if there is a resource for learning the everyday words they’d need – like drinking, bathing, eating. Another reason I wanted to work on the dictionary was the way dialects of some places were seen as inferior to those of other parts of the state. When people from one part of the state tease those from another for their pronunciation, it makes the latter think poorly of their dialect. Calling one dialect purer than another is like discriminating between castes, claiming one to be superior to the others,” Sreedharan says feelingly.

It also struck him as odd that people found it shameful to use words of their own language for private body parts but were not uncomfortable to use words from another language.

“I was also curious about why certain similar sounding words changed pronunciation when it came to Malayalam. 'Thodangu' – meaning start – is pronounced with ‘tho’ in Kannada, Telugu and Tamil but in Malayalam it becomes ‘thu’. 'Elaneer' – tender coconut water – is pronounced with ‘ila’ in Malayalam, but ‘ela’ in all the other languages. I put all of this together for the readers to interpret it in their own ways,” Sreedharan adds.

He kept finding Dravidian equivalents for Sanskrit words too. For instance, both ‘meen’ and ‘malsyam’, meaning fish, come from Sanskrit, Sreedharan says.

He found that it is easier to learn the scripts of other languages than that of Malayalam. That would also come out in the dictionary, he says.

The dictionary was not easy to publish. Having prepared the content, Sreedharan took it to a number of places to get it printed. Everyone was wary of getting the words wrong. Finally, a woman agreed to do the desktop publishing (DTP) for Rs 100 a page and she was paid Rs 1 lakh for the whole dictionary. It got printed by the Kerala Senior Citizens Forum.

“It is an expensive and exhaustive process. You travel, you read, you buy books and materials, and you sit for long hours to write. I have worked 10 to 14 hours on many days.”

Sometimes, he says, he cannot not believe that he achieved this at his age. All the reports of his dictionary even before it got published had him overwhelmed. And Nandan has made a documentary on him too – Dreaming of Words. The film has just got selected for the 18th Mindanao Film Festival. 

(Source: TNM)

Amma-Appa to nee-naan: Tamil and Korean share a list of common words

While the two languages have similar-sounding words, there has not been any linguistic study establishing the same.

If you were to go to South Korea and call out to your Amma (mother) or Appa (father), chances of a Korean national turning back in an answer are very high. Turns out, the exact same words are used in addressing parents in the Korean language too. And the similarities don’t stop there.

L: THANJAVUR BOMMAI FROM TAMIL NADU | R: KOREAN HANJI (PAPER) DOLL

Cultural and linguistic similarities across Asian countries is a familiar concept, it is the same among European countries. However, the extent to which the similarities can be observed forms a topic of great interest for scholars, anthropologists, linguists and the likes. Some might already know that the language spoken in Korean countries and the language spoken in Tamil Nadu (India), share certain words, much to the fascination of many.

The Canadian sitcom on Netflix, Kim’s Convenience, that follows a family of Korean immigrants living in Canada, with their Canadian born children, popularised this similarity between the two languages. Nandini Menon, a teaching and information personnel at InKo Centre in Chennai claims that there may be as many as 3000 such words in common between the two languages.

“For hair (mudi in Tamil) they say meoli (머리) (pronounced mao-li), for abdomen (thoppai in Tamil) they say Bogbu (복부) (pronounced toh-pu) and for come here (inge va in Tamil) they say yeogiwa (여기와) in Korean. There are many such words that are similar between the two languages,” she tells TNM.

This video interview with Jung Nam Kim, President of Korean Society of Tamil Studies, who speaks in Tamil, highlights some of the shared words. “I” is “naan” in Tamil and in Korean, similarly “you” is “nee” in both,” he says and claims he has found 500 similar words between the two languages as a result of his research. Tamil words naal (day), pul (grass), eru (climb) have similar-sounding words in Korean.

Watch: 

While this is indeed an astonishing fact, there are cultural similarities too. Soonjin Park, a Korean teacher at the InKo Centre shares a little about her first impression of cultural similarities between Tamil Nadu and South Korea. “I find the kolam drawn in front of houses fascinating,” she begins and continues, “I’ve also found it interesting that people here enjoy dancing and singing, I have observed it in films and during festivals. This is a lot like Koreans, who have enjoyed singing and dancing for a long time, and this is why K-Pop has developed now.”

Park adds, “Language and food are similar to Korea. There are many words with similar pronunciation. Also, the main food in Korea too is rice. And most people like spicy food very much like here in Tamil Nadu, which is similar in Korea.”

Nandini points out, “There’s Korea Mandu (meat, vegetables and tofu filled) that’s a lot like our kozhukattai. Like our Athirasam (a deep fried sweet) they have the Yakgwa. Koreans too have rice porridge (kanji) and it is called juk. And of course like our iddiappam/sevai they have the hand-pulled noodles called myron.”

However, Karthik Malli, independent researcher and writer on South Indian languages rebuffs these claims made on linguistic similarities on the basis that they have not stood up to academic scrutiny. “This link between the two languages has never been established in linguistics. If someone does make that claim, it is merely conjecture,” he begins.

“Even from a historical perspective, I cannot find significant links between Tamil region and Korea. There were trade links with China established by the discovery of a Hindu temple built in China by Tamil merchants and inscriptions on stones by Tamil migrant merchants and all that’s fascinating. But that has no bearing with this,” he explains.

Dravido-Korean linkage hypothesised and proposed by Homer B Hulbert, an American missionary who lived in Korea in the early 20th century was later dropped around the 1980s. In 1984, Morgan E Clippinger, a Korean studies scholar proposed over 400 sets of words that were similar between the two languages. 

Karthik believes the study in similarities has no academic consensus. “Most languages around the world use words that have “ba”, “ma”, “pa” in words for parents. In Arabic, Persian and Marati it’s ‘baba’ for father and it doesn’t mean the languages are similar. It is the first syllable babies make and therefore we cannot entirely base the relationship of these two languages on this similarity. Has this theory stood up to academic scrutiny? No. We may have some researchers saying it, but in academia, it is looked at like a fringe theory,” he says.

(Source: TNM)