MindYour Language

''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'

'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'

Ellis' sentiment jumped out at me because it seems to share some qualities with our current contemporary debates on English/Singlish in Singapore: A particular mode of language use becomes the defining characteristic of a certain class or category. So the colonised should speak with a kind of broken mangled English; the ah beng with a particular kind of chinesey singlish (i've always felt that singlish varies depending on the race of the person speaking and which asian grammar s/he incorporates).

Chatterjee already points out language as a site of colonial difference (cf The Nil Durpan affair). In a slight variation, we can say that even within one language, English, the mode of usage itself is a site of difference. Perhaps this has its descendants in the realm of English Language teaching, with the strange aura attached to "native speakers".

As the little episode above shows, language use seems less rigidly fixed by our physical boundaries; one thinks of 'impressions' as a kind of stand up comedy staple. Yet it is interesting to see how closely we associate language with these other markers of difference: for Ellis, to hear a grammatically correct sentence spoken by a native servant is revolting in itself.

Difference exists, it is the set of values (e.g. British Superiority) written into that difference that is problematic. But when we become attached to the values, then the difference cannot ever be allowed to mutate in character, or worse, to vanish: it becomes as if an attack on those values. Which is what happens in the passage above, and perhaps why the rest of the chapter degenerates into a load of nostalgia for the old Raj where the values of British Superiority were unchallenged.