When did you become an American

When did you become an American?
Buddy, Dude, Chill, Cool, Wazzup, No Kidding.Words we hear around us resound with Americanisms. The Queen’s English has become the Dude’s. As if, following world politics, English too is becoming unipolar.

Like all things, what was originally discovered by someone else has been appropriated by the Yanks. Earlier, the slogan was ‘Be English, speak English’; now it reads ‘Be a Yankee, speak like one’. Looking through history’s glasses: the redcoats have finally been turned back, from India.

Ever since the flower power generation landed on our shores, the evolution of English in India has been like deferred transmission from the US of A. What started as ghetto-talk in American towns in the ’70s became entries in dictionaries by the ’80s; and was eventually picked up by all Indians by the ’90s.

Reading Wodehouse, the last generation grew up calling each other bloke or chappie. Now, it is: “Hi dude” or “That guy”. ‘Rubbish’ was long thrown into the garbage can, and replaced with ‘crap’ or ‘trash’. Even phrases and quotations are seeing gross seismic changes. People prefer Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam” to Churchill’s quotations on history.

The structure, too, has become a victim of the lingua disease. Sentences like “You don’t know nothing” is commonly used on all television networks. The popularity of English is nothing new. It was sought after even during the Raj. But now the urge to learn English is overwhelming even in small towns and villages. English-teaching colleges are mushrooming all over the country. All advertising Hemingway-like grasp over the lingua franca. And the shift is certainly towards American English.

Queerly, the reasoning for the evolution came from an Englishman way back in 1945. Prophetically, George Orwell stated in his essay Politics and the English Language: “It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Now, as then, it is true everywhere.

The number of call centres popping up in metros demand all employees have average Joe six-pack stage names. What’s more, workers are trained to give them an American twang. There are colleges that readily train aspiring call centre employees in American dialects. Even something as innocuous as Microsoft Word – on which this article was written – offers the user an American dictionary. Naturally, the language gets reflected in lives outside offices. ‘Don’t know’ becomes ‘dunno’; ‘going to’ becomes ‘gonna’; everyone is ‘chilling’. ‘Bucks’ (a word that initially connoted just dollars) now means rupees too.

Still, like chicken tikka pizzas and aloo tikki burgers, language too is experiencing cross-pollination. In the north, one often runs into English-Hindi alliteration. Everywhere, vernacular phrases are literally translated as English expressions. Language, too, is fitted to suit our comfort levels.

What will eventually come out can never be gauged. American English could become as omnipresent as Coca-Cola or Pepsi — quite different from what Oscar Wilde once commented of his country, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” But then, what did old pops know. Right, dude?

American Slang’s Everyone Uses

Booze: The ‘in’ word for the good ol’ hooch, tipple.

Dude: Borrowed from rappers’ dictionary, a sobriquet for the word ‘friend’.

Chill: The frozen (not formal) cousin of the word ‘relax’.

Cool: The sweeping, ubiquitous expression for all occasions just to say good or good idea.

Bucks: Originally meaning dollars, now suggests all kinds of greenbacks


(Source of information : Tehlka )