English in Punjabi

Ordinary Punjabi speech now contains a very large amount of English, and not only technical vocabulary: the connectives, the discourse markers and whole clauses.

In the diaspora this goes further. British and Canadian Punjabi runs the two languages together with Punjabi grammar and English content words, and the result is intelligible to another diaspora Punjabi and confusing to someone from a village.

In Punjab itself, English is the aspiration and the medium of the private schools, and a great many children are being educated in an English their teachers do not speak well and are losing the Punjabi they do.

The result described by teachers is a generation fluent in neither, which is a claim made often and measured rarely.

Punjabi popular music mixes the two deliberately and successfully, which is the one place where the mixture is an achievement rather than a loss.

Languages take from each other constantly and it is not a problem in itself. It becomes one when the borrowing runs one way and the borrowing language is not being written.

Punjabi has absorbed English wholesale: the vocabulary of school, of government, of medicine, of the visa office and of the phone is largely English in a Punjabi frame.

Code switching mid sentence is normal and is not a marker of class in the way it is in some other Indian languages. A farmer and a professor both do it.

The concern about it is really a concern about domain loss. A language that keeps the kitchen and loses the office is on a path that has been described many times elsewhere.

What we don't know

  • Whether the described loss of competence in both languages is measurable. It has not been measured.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Linguistic literature on code-switching in Punjabi.
  • Punjab education department language policy.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 62 accounts in What the Voice Carried, the chapter of this site covering the poetry, the music and the oral tradition.