One trajectory for the essay?

Current perceptions in India have it that English is being democratized and is coming within the grasp of more and more people beyond the elite. A massive language shift is underway, and even so there are many loud voices saying that it is not happening rapidly enough (Nilekani?)

But what is less likely to be remarked upon is that the various “supply and demand” forces at work here are not just increasing the number of people who know English but are reconfiguring a field of (multi)linguistic diversity in which spoken and written English have long occupied quite distinct niches. (Jacob)

This development flies in the face of many scholars who have addressed the sociolinguistics of English in India) through such concepts as “modularity,” “interlanguage,” and “auntie tongue syndrome.”
Incidentally, such notions appear to reiterate—i.e. to harden and crystallize rather than to dissect and examine-- widely held “common sense” ideologies about English in India (or Indian English). We might call the hegemony of such views Second Language Ideology, after the Standard Language Ideology that has been so trenchantly examined by linguists.

Such notions generalize from the written use of the English language in India, leaving spoken forms of the language largely unaddressed. True, colonization entrenched the written form of the language and made it authoritative. (Thus, these notions make eminent sense for thinking through official letter-writing, petitions, etc. and even in certain oral contexts, where speech is “entextualized” in set formulations and registers such as legal or bureacutic settings.)

But such approaches, which have seen many recent and up to date rearticulations, seem moribund and obsolete all of a sudden. This is because the forms of language shift mentioned above are not just quantitative but qualitative. Specifically, what is noteworthy is not just the fact that more and more people in India are setting out to acquire English: it is that more and more people studying it with a view to speaking it (rather than writing it, or using it for purposes other than the expressive function.) If in the past, to have a command of English was described as “English janna”; now there is a significant shift to “English bolna.”

Written April 10.