Sinhala in peril

I write to complement Mr. Sangadasa Akurugoda’s essay “Why get rid of our linguistic heritage, and move back to English?” in ‘The Island’ of 8th February 2021. This is nothing to get excited about. It is not long ago that the Sinhala people (Sinhalayo) began to lose their love and pride of Sinhala – the language that gives identity to the people. We developed its syntax, grammar, and the beautiful cursive script over a period of two millennia. Spelling and pronunciation pose little room for error and embarrassment. It is the language of the Thripitaka, Guttila Kaavya and the modern masterpiece in drama – Singhabahu.

English is written in the Roman script and its spelling and pronunciation have to be learned almost word by word. Bernard Shaw showed how ‘fish’ could be written as ‘ghoti”. With my entire education and work in English, I learned the proper pronunciation of the word ‘vignette’ at the age of 76. when I pronounced it as written, a friend of mine corrected me. While I was familiar with the word, both in literature and in photography; I had never had to speak it until then. I didn’t know that the ‘g’ was silent and there’s an unwritten ‘y’ between the n and e. The problem never arises in Sinhala.

I am not disparaging English, which has adopted many words from other languages. Great works of literature have been written in it. As professor Higgins told Eliza – “English is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible”. Today, it is also the language of science, technology, commerce, and communication among nations. Everybody should learn it.

However, no nation with a long history would ever sink so low as to denigrate its mother tongue into a pidgin language – which is what’s happening now to our Sinhala. In general conversation among people, and in all forms of communication over the electronic media, there’s hardly a sentence spoken without a couple of English words thrown in, for which meaningfully perfect Sinhala words are easily available. Contrast this with the same person speaking in English; she would never use a single Sinhala word. It is equally relevant to the Tamil people because I am told by my Tamil friends that even the Tamil language is being similarly corrupted with English.

Why is this so? I am inclined to believe that it is the expression of our covert slavishness to the conquering white master of yesteryear. Let me explain. However much we know that English is important, it is a language difficult to learn when it is not your mother tongue. No one can learn a new language without making mistakes. But we have been brought up to think that it is shameful to make mistakes in English. No such strictures apply to Sinhala. Therefore, one has to give the impression that she has mastered English. So she mixes the few English words she has learned to pronounce properly, into the Sinhala speech. Of course, with this approach she will never master either language.

There’s more to this slavishness. We worship English. How many of the hundreds of privately built apartment buildings in the city, posh and not so posh, have been given Sinhala names? May be there are, but I haven’t seen a single. From a different standpoint, not infrequently, a Buddhist monk explains a word in Pali while delivering a sermon in Sinhala giving the English word instead of the Sinhala term! Isn’t he also telling the listeners that he knows English?

Then there’s the debasing use of the word godak (ගොඩක්) – a collective noun meaning ‘heap’. It has become cancerous and has effectively displaced about thirty words into oblivion. It is repetitively used by everybody including professors of Sinhala, learned monks, and teachers. (If this hasn’t struck you, listen to any Sinhala programme on electronic media.) But when speaking in English no one would say a heap of water, a heap of elephants, or even a heap of wind. We were taught in school to avoid using the same word over and over, but to use appropriate synonyms. This sloppy usage appears even in writing, particularly in sub-titles on TV. It is sad that even 65 years after Sinhala was made the state language, there is no dictionary of synonyms in Sinhala. Apart from thoughtless mixing of English, Sinhala is also being defiled and disgraced with a usage that is distinctly crude and degrading – particularly in speech. This happens mostly among younger persons. This phenomenon is addressed in a book captioned ‘patta arthal singhala’ by Bandara Wevagedara. At present there are several other crude ways of perverting Sinhala.

The writing on the wall is clear. With our very identity under relentless attack, we have not far to travel. All component things are subject to decay. Other great civilizations have perished in the past. So might it be with Sinhala. But I know that there are some sinhalayo who would want to avert that sad fate. I hope they would try and succeed.

Ananda Wanasinghe

ananda@slt.lk