Diversity in spoken English                                                       
Simplified English to suit the speakers

The sheer number of English speaking people has led to a burgeoning of an equal number of varieties in terms of renditions and dialects. English, because of its spread has attained great levels and scaled all frontiers. This vast reach has led to multiple versions of the language. You must have heard of words like Hinglish and Pidgin. Pidgin, simply put is a supporting language that has come into being through the attempts of speakers of two different languages to communicate. This leads to a version which is not only simplified but customised to suit the speakers. It leads to a breakdown of structure, grammar and includes a lot of innovation, juxtaposition of words and pronunciation to suit the end purpose which is communication. Interestingly enough, the origin of the word Pidgin can be traced to the year 1876, from pigeon English in1859, the reduced form of the language used in China for communication with Europeans, from pigeon 1826, itself a pidgin word, representing a Chinese pronunciation of business with the connotation extended in 1921 to “any simplified language.”

The root cause of the multiplicity is the not only the spread of English as a global form of verbal communication but also the fact that historically countries have taken on the flavour of the language of the rulers. India adheres in the strictest sense to British English in all walks of life starting from the educational institutes to the official world. Hinglish is the notion of two meanings packed into one word. It is the usage of Hindi and English combined in one sentence. This concept started in the metros but later spread across everywhere. We have regional the spin-offs of these combinations as well; we have Kinglish (Kannada+ English) and some more equally far fetched combinations like Minglish (Marathi+ English), Telgish (Telugu + English), Tanglish (Tamil+ English) and Bonglish (Bengali + English). This has only increased the comfort zone of the users and also contributed to the spread of English to a large cross-section of society. One finds such versions of the language in popular writings, advertisements, newspapers etc. A dialect is a variety of a language spoken in a geographical region. Because of the extensive distribution of English speakers, a diverse number of dialects have surfaced over the course of history. The prominent ones are American English, Australian English, British English, Indian English and Singaporean English among others.

Jargons are the specific vocabulary of a line of work or of some other dedicated field of action and are a part of the technical terms that exist in a profession. Professional groups have their work specific terminology which may or may not be useful to people outside that forum. However, nowadays, there is a lot of terminology which gets bandied across various fields. Scientific jargon is especially helpful to people from the same profession, as communication becomes precise and brief and of course immensely clear.

One profession that demands simplification of vocabulary is the medical world. The patient always wishes that s/he understood what was beings said of his/ her condition. To cite an example, in the medical jargon, a simple term like the ‘heart attack’ is known as a myocardial infarction…myocardial stems from the word myocardium which means the muscular substance of the heart and infarction means area in the tissue that is dying due to lack of blood supply!