We are morphing into a culture where we look down upon people who aren't adept at talking in the English language, as if the language of Shakespeare and Poe and Woolf and co. were a golden yardstick that everyone should be judged with. I think it is a sad state of affairs and it doesn't help that schools shame students who talk in the Nepalese language. As far as I can remember, I was even punished as a student for "talking in Nepalese".
Sometimes teachers (of English) come up to me and ask what can be done to improve "English Speaking in the School". I have serious reservations whenever any "reformer"/ "improver" , and people of this kind burble about very vague terms such as "improvement"/ "development"etc. When I taught at the gloriously located (an hours walk from Namche Bazar) Sir Edmund Hillary School, I was shocked that students had to learn concepts in 3 languages: their curriculum had recently transitioned into an all out English language based text books (thereby benumbing parents from understanding what was written there), there was the Nepalese language, and the students had to learn Tibetan as well. And a sizable population of the students belonged to the Rai community.
In other words: Confusion, confusion and more confusion. The Sherpa students confided to me that the way I talked in the English language didn't help their cause- it would have been better if I knew how to explain things to them in Tibetan. Students could have grasped concepts of Science and Mathematics better in the Nepalese language but since I am hopeless at explaining scientific concepts in Nepali, I tried my hand at "Neplish" aka "Nepangrezi". I was always fearful that this would only lead students to be adept at neither of the languages.
But as I was living in a Buddhist village, I could only console myself with the idea of the "Middleway"- above and beyond extremes. I wished students, who were brought up in such a confusing environment, wouldn't feel that they were "nowhere" in terms of their skill at either of the language. After all, one wouldn't want to be bereft of hope, and feel like the character of Alice Oswald's "Narcissus":
"For a while I was neither one thing nor another...
Before my strength went down down into the darkness"
I say this because a lot of students who graduate from High School often say that they have difficulties in forming well-structured sentence in either of the two languages- they're confident at neither.
In the famous case of Martin Luther King Jr. etc vs Ann Arbor School district, it was deemed that the teachers try to adapt their vernacular to that of the students, who spoke the African-American Vernacular English. Maybe if we had some respect for the English spoken in the Nepali style, we'd develop a peculiar vernacular of our own. I tried to talk in what is known as the "Nepali accent"- I tend to bring out fists of laughter from my friends when I do so.
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