Page 259 - Beyond Methods

Ensuring social relevance 247 and cultures. They have, however, taken two different paths to the
issue of standardization.
INDIAN ENGLISH AND STANDARDIZATION
Considered to be “among the most distinctive varieties in the English- speaking world” (Crystal, 1997, p. 41), Indian English represents the extent to which a foreign language can be profitably reconstructed into a vehicle to express sociocultural norms and networks that are typically local. The process of Indianization of English has not left any of the linguistic systems—syntactic, lexical, semantic, or rhetorical—untouched (see Kachru, 1985, for details). Enjoying the constitutionally guaranteed status of an “associate” official lan- guage, English is used within the legal system, administration, secondary and higher education, the armed forces, the media, and industry. Although only a fraction of the population are fluent in English, it has penetrated most layers of the society through Eng- lish words borrowed into Indian languages.
In spite of its deep penetration, the English language has not, argue Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998, p. 153), “made any serious inroads into the social customs, ceremonies connected with births, marriages and deaths, religious functions and rituals that go with festivals, worship in temples, intimate interactions in the family and in the peer group—even in urban areas.” Because of this phe- nomenon, they suggest that English in India should be treated as a “modulect.” It is the modular use of English, they assert, “that al- lows some Indians to use English according to their needs, and yet keep it separate from their local ‘identity’ which is deeply rooted in their ancient past and in the several layers of a pluralistic pattern.”
It is certainly the emphasis on individual and collective identity that allows Indians to accept the variety spoken by educated Indians as norms for standardization rather than looking up to the norms associated with the British variety. For educational purposes, then, it is the Indian variety that is given prominence. While Indian writing in English—creative, professional, or journalistic—is expected to conform to international grammatical norms, all other forms of lan- guage use is shaped by the local variety. In fact, in schools and col- leges, English is taught by Indian teachers using Indian textbooks written by Indian authors. Neither the policy makers nor the general