English in the Age of Linguistic Flux

 English in the Age of Linguistic Flux

While commenting on the gatekeeping of the English language, Bruce Gilley, in his essay “Guarding the Gates of Our Language,” argues that once a culture loses control over its language, everything else is bound to follow. This argument opens up two important dimensions of English. The first is the dimension of colonial hangover, and the second is the role of English as a language shaped and circulated by twenty-first-century technology.

It is well known that Pakistan was born out of a colonial legacy when the Indian subcontinent was decolonized. Even before independence, the people of the Indo-Pak subcontinent were required—or at least strongly encouraged—to imitate the pronunciation and speech styles of their colonial masters, not only to secure employment but also to gain favor in various social and professional fields. However, once the colonial era formally ended and India and Pakistan emerged as independent states, it was expected that linguistic matters would also be addressed accordingly. This, however, did not happen. English continued to function in these countries, as in many other parts of the world, as a lingering colonial legacy.

Pakistan occupies a particularly striking position in this regard. As near-perfect mimics of the colonial era, and as “mimic men” surviving into the postcolonial period, Pakistanis made persistent efforts to copy English pronunciation, grammatical structures, and stylistic norms as closely as possible. The most obvious examples are English-medium schools and the widespread use of English across various institutional and professional domains, often at the expense of the national language. What has happened to the national language is a separate debate; however, it is undeniable that English has survived and flourished in Pakistan in remarkably powerful ways, continually reinforcing its prestige and dominance.

This leads us to a crucial question: should we continue to follow English as rigidly regulated by gatekeeping mechanisms—such as dictionaries, grammar books, and teachers who insist on “correct” or “pure” forms of the language? Or should we move forward with English as it has historically developed and continues to evolve? After all, English is a language that has borrowed extensively from other languages. Its own history reveals that in the fourteenth century it was primarily the language of farmers and laborers, not of the educated elite or the clergy. Modern English itself emerged through the interaction of Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon English. Later, as colonial expansion carried English across the globe, it absorbed words, expressions, and structures from numerous indigenous languages.

As a result, English underwent continuous changes in usage, pronunciation, and structure. This dynamic process became even more pronounced through the contributions of postcolonial writers, who reshaped English by infusing it with local idioms, rhythms, and vocabularies. Writers from Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent, for instance, incorporated indigenous linguistic features into fiction, drama, and poetry to reflect local realities and cultural identities. Clear examples range from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi. For example, Achebe says, “Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” The sentence is evidence of English language carrying the epistemology of Igbo culture and hence formulating a new variety of English. Indian writers further developed this practice, which was famously described as the “chutnification” of English. Arundhati Roy, particularly in The God of Small Things, employs a hybrid language that blends English with Indian linguistic and cultural elements, including regional dialects from Kerala.

Through these practices, postcolonial writers and speakers initiated a transformative process in which English became increasingly localized. This led to the emergence of multiple “Englishes” and eventually to the establishment of the academic field known as World Englishes. Within this framework, traditional gatekeeping by native or “pure” English speakers proved ineffective.

Today, not only do multiple Englishes coexist, but English itself continues to undergo noticeable changes in pronunciation, verb usage, grammatical structures, and stylistic patterns—even among native speakers. The twenty-first century has further accelerated this process by dismantling linguistic barriers through digital platforms, social media, artificial intelligence, and machine translation technologies such as ChatGPT. ChatGPT has given birth to an English language variety called AI mediated Globally Neutral English, a variety of English meant more for clarity, speed and cross-cultural intelligibility rather than native speakers idiom and local identity. These forces have collectively contributed to the emergence of new forms of English.

While it is true that contemporary English may not resemble the “pure” forms spoken by native speakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is equally true that colonial expansion had already enriched English with linguistic material from countless other languages. Globalization, following colonization and postcolonialism, has intensified processes of addition, deletion, alteration, and transformation. Americanization has played a particularly significant role, as American English developed distinct patterns of pronunciation, spelling, and morphology. Consequently, English is no longer the possession of the English alone. It has become a global language—belonging not to one people or nation, but to the world at large.