Impact of English on Punjabi

IMPACT OF ENGLISH ON PUNJABItc "IMPACT OF ENGLISH ON PUNJABI"

Though the Punjab remained under the British rule from 1849 to 1947 only, Punjabi has been in constant contact with English in one way or the other ever since the frontiers of the British Empire in India and those of the Sikh chieftaincies came closer to each other after the decisive Battle of Buxar in 1764.  Considering that the status of Punjabi has been politically / culturally subservient to English during the best part of this period of well over two centuries of contact, it is but natural for the structure of the former to be deeply influenced by that of the latter.  This paper attempts to ascertain the nature and extent of the impact of English on the lexical, phonological and orthographic systems of Punjabi.

Impact on the Lexical System

The most conspicuous impact of the contact between the two languages has been in the form of copying of about 2,300 general (i.e., non-technical) English words by Punjabi*.  This estimate is based on an extensive fieldwork conducted by me for collecting and authenticating the data for my doctoral thesis (‘A Study of Some Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of English Loan-Words in Punjabi’, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, 1997).  The number of technical English copied words in Punjabi is greater than that of general English copied words in Punjabi by scores of times.  This is obvious from the very fact that an overwhelming majority of the technical terms in use in Punjabi at present have been copied from the English language.
Another impact of English on the lexical system of Punjabi appears in the form of copied blends and copied translations. It may be mentioned here that while almost all the copied blends have come into existence in a more or less natural manner, most of the copied translations have been the result of the conscious efforts of the Department of Languages, Punjab.  It is precisely due to this reason that whereas copied blend like bus-adda, double-roti, police-chowki, etc. are frequently used by the Punjabis in their day-to-day speech, the use of copied translations like mukh-adhyapak (headmaster),  prarthna pattar (application), etc. is generally limited only to official correspondence.
The prolonged contact between the two languages has also generated quite a large number of items of code-mixing.  In fact, there is hardly any lexical item of the English language that is out of bounds to a Punjabi code-mixer.  So much so that every unpremeditated sentence in day-to-day speech of an educated Punjabi is likely to contain at least one or two English items of code-mixing.  As a matter of fact, his speech loses much of its natural vigour and flow if he is made to shun the English items of code-mixing altogether.     

Impact on the Phonological System

While in most cases Punjabi has chiselled the non-native elements in the phonology of the English copied words in accordance with its native genius, it has also adopted certain features of the English phonology in certain cases.  Consequently, the phonological structure of Punjabi has undergone modifications at both phonemic and syllabic levels.

At the phonemic level, Punjabi has adopted two of the RP phonemes, namely the vocalic phonemes in the first syllables of the words setting and college.  The phonemic structure of Punjabi has been affected by English copied words in Punjabi in the following ways.  Firstly, the copied words like thrasher, spray, strike and screen have given four new consonant clusters, as occurring at the beginning of these words, to the Punjabi phonology.   Secondly, with the copying of the English words like spring, stretcher, fingerprints, a Punjabi syllable can now contain up to six phonemes in all and up to three marginal phonemes on either side of the syllable nucleus; earlier, it could contain only up to five phonemes in all and up to two consonant phonemes on either side of a syllable peak.

Impact on the Orthographic System

The English orthography has also affected its Punjabi counterpart to a considerable extent.  In the first place, it was due to the influence of the English orthography that the word-boundaries in the Gurmukhi script have come to be marked with a blank space.  Earlier, all the words in a line were written together, that is, without any dividing space and connected by a single top-line.

The second impact of English on the Punjabi orthography has been in the form of the copying of English punctuation marks by Punjabi.  Originally, Punjabi orthography did not have any punctuation marks except a sign indicating the end of a sentence i.e. the full stop.  After Punjabi accepted the English orthographic convention of leaving a blank space after each word, it was realized that it also needed to adopt the English punctuation marks like comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, question mark, exclamation mark, inverted commas and the parenthetic marks for making its written communication more precise and expressive.

The third impact of English on the Punjabi orthography is only in the process of manifesting itself as yet.  The Punjabi orthography has been in dire need of suitable changes in it ever since the copying of the English vocalic phonemes occurring in the first syllable of the English copied words like bedroom, college, etc., but no steps have been taken by the Department of Languages, Punjab to update the Punjabi orthography to represent the additional phonemes in an unambiguous manner in the Gurmukhi script.  In the absence of any standard practice for representing these copied phonemes, it is all left to the whims of the writer to spell the copied words containing these phonemes in the manner he deems fit.  Thus, some Punjabis write the word bed with the Punjabi diacritic representing the vocalic phoneme in the GIE pronunciation of the word bade, others write it with the one representing the vocalic sound in the word dad.  Moreover, there are also instances of confusion in differentiating between the minimal pairs like guess and gas, which are at present written identically due to the absence of discrete diacritics representing the vocalic phonemes in these words.  The required diacritics can be devised quite easily by slightly modifying the existing Gurmukhi diacritics for the neighbouring Punjabi sounds.  The problem is only that of popularising the new diacritics: the Department of Languages, Punjab can use its resources and authority to do so. One can only hope that this Department will take necessary steps for enabling the Gurmukhi script to live up to its reputation of having one-to-one correspondence between its spellings and sounds.

The foregoing discussion clearly bears out that English has left a multifaceted mark on the Punjabi language.  As seen above, a number of modifications undergone by it at the lexical, phonological and orthographic levels can be traced to the long and sustained contact that Punjabi has had with English right since the middle of the eighteenth century.  As English has come to acquire the status of a prestigious second language in most of the Punjabi-speaking areas of the country, it will continue to enrich the Punjabi language in the days to come as well.

* In this paper, the metaphor of copying has been used for the ‘give and take’ of linguistic items between languages as the traditional metaphor of borrowing is highly misleading. (see my paper “On Riding the Phenomenon of Borrowing of Misnomers” in Indian linguistics Vol. 61, 1-4, 2000, pp 9-12.