Comedy programmes in Kannada — on stage and on television — often take pot shots at the ‘corruption’ of the language in Bangalore, oops, Bengaluru. Yet impervious to criticism, the city thrives in its plurality. City Express attempts to decipher communication, in this multi-lingual context.
A popular radio show, a few years ago, had a person speaking in English, Hindi and Kannada with a heavy Malayalam accent. The show moved beyond the traditional replacement of the sound ‘a’ to ‘au’ (recall the word auto) to even inclusion of words like cheta in every day language. Keen observers report that this usage can be commonly found in areas such as Koramangala, Madiwala, S G Palaya, parts of Thippasandra and Old Airport Road. If a kid is addressed kutta, illi ba he will go, even if he does not understand the Malayalam word kutta (boy). “Through school and college, I did not realise that ‘maga’ and ‘machchan’ are Kannada and Tamil words respectively,” says IT employee Murali P, who was raised in Bangalore. Thanks to the popularity of Tamil music composers like Illayaraja and A R Rahman, Tamil songs became popular as dance numbers in college competitions before Hindi and English songs took over the campuses. “We took great pleasure in singing and dancing to ‘upu karuvadu ura vache soru’ and ‘pettai rap’ through college. In fact, certain words were a part of the college lingo to suggest ‘nerds’ and those who were jobless (‘vetti’),” explains Nivedita Ram, a Manglorean, who moved to Bangalore recently.
A crime-beat journalist says that Tamil words are infused into the local language such that police still use words like Alkatti for informers. Many linguists in the city say that the Kannada word ‘madi’, which means ‘do’, is commonly suffixed to verbs from other languages to give the illusion of using the local language.
Sample jaldi jaldi madi, enjoy madi, chill madi, sikkra (fast in Tamil) madi among others. While on this subject, one cannot help but ponder over what is evolving into a dialect — the mixture of Kannada, Hindi, Tamil and Dakhini spoken by a section of society. ‘Nimdhukke, kudhkobe, and gothabithaithe’ are words typical to this emerging dialect. These words often spill over to references to a culture. Most bakeries in the city stock ‘dil kush’ or ‘dil pasand’, a coconut stuffed Indian bread. These food items too find references in the local language.
Litteratuer U R Ananthamurthy once said that it has become a fad to add the sound of ‘u’ to Tamil, Telugu and English words to pass it off as Kannada. A comment attested by the anchors of various shows on television and radio. “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his seminal piece ‘Nature’ in 1836. However, one is not sure of the order in Bangalore though.