The Supreme Court has been discussing linguistics this month while hearing challenges to the CBSE’s three-language formula, which mandates that two of the three languages must be native Indian languages, a category that does not include English. The top court had wondered whether it was correct to treat English as a “non-indigenous” language, given its long history in the country, and its role as a link language in governance and higher education. So should English be considered a foreign language in India? Apoorvanand and Ganesh Devy discuss the question in a conversation moderated by Priscilla Jebaraj.
Is English a foreign language in India?Apoorvanand: No. It came from outside the geography that we define as India now. But it has been Indianised. We cannot now say that English is foreign to the soil because it’s being used in different forms and for different purposes by people across India.
Ganesh Devy: Hindi and English are born of the same Indo-European language family. One part of that family came to us 3,500 years ago; that was Sanskrit and one of the descendants of Sanskrit is Hindi. Another part came through Europe 400 years ago, in the 17th century. So, they both belong to the same root language, and both of them have come to us at different times.
