In Communicado

YO DUDE, COSA WENA KYKA? is a 1992 short documentary based in a primary school in Cape Town, South Africa, in a multilingual classroom that implemented some concepts I had developed in my research on languages. Students came to the school with a knowledge of multiple languages—some they spoke at home with immigrant parents, others they learned in school, or in their localities, or bits of English slang. I proposed in my work that these resources could be used in the classroom through activities and discussions. For instance, in one classroom of students who were around twelve years old, the teacher introduced the singular and plural of a noun. The students would then collaborate with each other to translate these into all the languages they knew. Once they had the translations, they would work together to understand the grammatical rules for pluralising in each language. These steps not only exposed them to additional languages, but also led to a spirit of scientific inquiry and promoted cognitive growth.

The children taught teachers new words or concepts in these languages, which the teachers could incorporate into their teaching. The title of the film—which translates to “Yo dude, what are you looking at?”—was a mix of English slang, Afrikaans and Xhosa, introduced by the students themselves. Our class showed that the multilingualism prevalent among children in a diverse community could be used to create new ways of learning, which incorporated their skills, rather than forcing them to learn in a single language or format.

The school in Cape Town was hardly any different from one in India. By the age of four, children often become proficient in what are otherwise counted as two or three distinct languages. (And in this sense, all children are equal despite their socio economic differences.) We all tend to think of language as somewhat frozen, a fixed lexicon or vocabulary paired with grammar. But languages rarely behave that way in the real world. They are fluid in nature. Languages are acquired and change on the streets, shaped by social mores, proximity to different communities, the social location of the speaker and, importantly, government policy. Distinct vocabularies and knowledge systems naturally blend into each other when people share spaces, especially in a country like India. Children pick up the languages their parents speak, the ones they hear in the marketplace, the ones their friends speak, among others. For some in northern India, for instance, it may be a mix of sentence syntax of Hindi with English terms, and some Punjabi, Haryanvi and Urdu thrown in.

Scholars or policy-makers often dismiss this as code-mixing, code-switching or pidginisation and creolisation—essentially, the blending of languages or introduction of expressions from other languages. But this way of speaking is what we practice every day. As the linguist PB Pandit wrote in his 1972 book, India as a Sociolinguistic Area, variability in how people speak actually facilitates communication rather than obstructs it. Even when strangers meet on trade routes, they evolve varieties of pidgins and creoles to communicate with one another. As people travel through different villages, districts and states in India, it is not the case that communication suddenly breaks down at any given point.