The encounters between local languages and English the world over have generally given rise to two kinds of stories. One, spawned under colonialism, has been elegiac. It has mourned the encounter, in which English has come out a winner at the expense of the native tongue. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o represents this first type, having written extensively about how his native Gikuyu wilted under the onslaught of English. The linguistic battle, he warns, is a reflection of the wider struggle between traditional communities and the powerful colonial social engine.
The second kind of story also has a melancholy beginning, thanks to its colonial origin, but it also attempts to move further by recognising the interactions that take place between languages. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe falls in this category. In his novel No Longer at Ease (1960), for instance, the linguistic battle (in this case between English and his native Ibo) is projected onto the domestic sphere in the form of a division between an instinctual, oral space and a rational, practical space – which Achebe further distinguishes as maternal and paternal, respectively:
Mother's room was the most distinctive in the whole house, except perhaps for Father's. … Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man's power was the written word, or better still, the printed word. … The result of Okonkwo's mystic regard for the written word was that his room was full of old books and papers. … Mother's room, on the other hand, was full of mundane things.
This is undoubtedly an unsustainable division, socially and psychologically. In its gendered form, it is a particularly solid bulwark for patriarchy; yet transferred to the verbal plane, it is a strong enabler of linguistic change. As such, all eyes were on Achebe as he tried to rewrite the rules of the game by choosing to wield his pen in the language of the 'father', while Thiong'o returned to writing in the 'mother' tongue. Thus, the arena in which the two languages collide comes to look quite a bit more complex than the elegiac model would make it out to be. Wherever and whenever languages collide, there are bound to be casualties – thus providing the motivations for the laments in the first place. But words also seep into one another, leading to the new coinages and neologisms without which no language can thrive. Certainly this can be said of the situation in India, where English has been an important site of struggle from the colonial times to the present.