My English will never be ‘perfect’ – and that’s what keeps a language alive
My first day in an English-speaking school was miserable. It was full of little humiliations: the kind that with the hindsight of adulthood seem trivial but in childhood plant the seed of a feeling of inadequacy that one can never expel.
My family had just moved to Kenya, where English was the official language. I was seven and could not speak a word of it, having grown up until that point in an Arabic-speaking country, and been educated at an Arabic school.
I sat silently in class in a daze, hoping no one would notice my inability. But I drew attention because I had put my schoolbag in the wrong place. And the teacher, who finally had to resort to gestures to get through to me, demanded to know where it was.
Out of some childish impulse to hide my awkward self and belongings, I had stashed my inappropriately large bag, overstuffed with provisions by an anxious mum, in a cupboard at the back of the class. I sat in silence as the teacher’s interrogation grew more irate. In the end I blurted out where I had put the bag, but in Arabic. The teacher blinked. The whole class laughed. My eyes stung. The bullying started that day and didn’t stop until I had learned enough English to lose the stain of difference.
The funny thing is, impossible though it seemed at that moment, I don’t actually remember learning English, which I suppose is down to the speed with which children pick up a new language. All I recall is one day sitting in humiliated isolation and the next being able to read a whole gradeone book from cover to cover.
Despite the quick uptake, my language challenges weren’t over. My English was lopsided – all bloated vocabulary from too much reading to overcompensate for a late start, but no confidence to use the words in conversation. It jostled with, but failed to replace, my first language: Arabic.
Today, even after almost four decades of education and work in the English language, I still falter by the standards my teachers set. My accent is all over the place. I still often have to pause in speech and translate thoughts in my head from Arabic first, which affects my articulacy; and I still mispronounce words.
I am also often corrected, something that reflexively takes me back to that moment under the spotlight in the classroom. It’s not an unkind correction, most of the time, more an amused question. When I say “meLANkolly” did I really mean “MELON-kolly”? “Interwined”, it was gently pointed out, perhaps had a T in the middle (it shouldn’t: much more evocative without it). And the most British correction of all comes in the form of a polite, “How are you pronouncing that? I think it might be X, but I could be wrong.” It’s not as uncommon an impulse as one would think. A recent survey revealed that many people are more than happy to correct friends, family and strangers when they make mistakes.
I don’t have time for that kind of preciousness about language any more. Having spent so many years trying to “improve” my English, I realised that the more I tried to follow norms, be they related to accent, pronunciation or even inflection and tone, the more hesitant and overly formal my English became. The English I ended up speaking is (as all languages are) dynamic and porous to other influences, and all the more expressive for it.
In my childhood home, the English we learned in school merged with Arabic in ways so organic I couldn’t tell you when it began or who started it. Where Arabic sentence constructions seemed hard, simpler English ones replaced them, and vice versa. We added “ing” to Arabic words to turn them into verbs. Other times, we transposed simpler Arabic sentence structures on to more cumbersome English ones, dropping words like “am” and “is”, which don’t exist in Arabic. To this day, we still say “I tired” or “I hungry”.
This isn’t a quirk of upbringing: it’s the experience of the majority of English-speaking people. Far more people speak English in the rest of the world than in native-English-speaking countries. I am even reluctant to use the word “native”, because it implies some ownership – some source of correct, consistent, unevolving English that exists only in a small number of nations, and that others have corrupted.
English is listed as a national language in more than 50 countries across the world. It is used by the Indian government as a supplement to Hindi, and it is the language of the Indian judiciary. In some African countries, a version of English is the main language of officialdom, education and the media. With this adoption, a process called “nativisation” can occur – with local accents, grammar and even cultural concepts (for example, the position of “senior wife” in polygamous west African countries) influencing the English and subtly changing it.
Even standard English has undergone “nativisation” of its own through history, absorbing huge amounts of French vocabulary for example, with even a sprinkling of Arabic in there too. No version of English we speak now is “pure”, so policing pronunciation, or indeed any other arbitrary code of language, is futile – the equivalent of patrolling an ever-shifting border.
The purpose of language is to facilitate communication. The magic of language is its capacity to spontaneously evolve to facilitate that communication, incorporating and accommodating the influences, and thus the needs, of those who use it. Caring about the integrity of the English language and allowing it to breathe and change go hand in hand. One could even say they were interwined.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist