In March this year, the 81-year-old UK-based international charity organisation that works with 15 million people in 80 countries, many of them low- or middle-income and bedevilled by conflict, became the apotheosis of linguistic wokeness. Over 92 finger-wagging pages, its Inclusive Language Guide, two years in the making, advised speakers of English –“the language of a colonising nation” – to omit a sheaf of words from everyday parlance and rework others in keeping with political correctness (PC).
Much of this PC could only have emerged from the cocooned navel-gazing of champions of wokeness in the putative domains of English – the UK and the US. None of them seems to have the faintest inkling of the existence today of many Englishes, mostly local and even hyperlocal, across the world.
England is spoken by 1.5 billion of Earth’s 7.8 billion residents – or nearly 20% of the population. The vast majority of these people speak a scintillating diversity of Englishes, some of them cheek-by-jowl with canonical English, most of them an inch away from being mutually unintelligible, separated by hybridisation with local vernaculars, homologation, playful or fluid syntacticity, and pronunciation.
Here’s a compacted list of words and phrases that Oxfam would like turfed out. “...is afflicted with, suffers from, is a victim of, wheelchair-bound, normal, healthy, able-bodied, AIDS victim, MS sufferer, the elderly, seniors, youth, people who have special needs, mental, mental patient, psychotic, OCD, manic depressive, standing with, committed suicide, unsuccessful suicide, care burden, the burden of care, decent work, child marriage, early marriage, labour force, prostitute, prostitution, use of prostitutes, use of sex workers, attitudes, behaviours, women and children, ladies, women’s economic empowerment/ WEE, biological male/female, male/female bodied’, ‘natal male/female’ and born male/female, gender minorities, LGBT, LGBTQIX, homosexuality, gay and lesbian, ‘mother’ or ‘father’, ‘he’ or ‘she’ based on their name or physical appearance, transgendered, transsexual, pro-life, sanitary products, feminine hygiene, expectant mothers, VAWG (violence against women and girls), victim, victim of rape, illegal immigrant, economic migrant, expat, transit migrant, refugee crisis, upstream/upwards accountability, downwards accountability, mixed race, black, capacity building, empowerment, Indians, Eskimo, Aboriginal, the West, third world, first world, developing countries, developed countries, the homeless, black market, slum, slum dwellers, international aid sector, ethnic minority, local language, local people, local population, local knowledge, local staff, headquarters, natural disasters, poor people, BAME, BME, beneficiaries, recipients, vulnerable people, giving a voice to, helping, field visit/field trip/mission”.
There happen to be a handful of words that can undoubtedly do with replacement with more appropriate terminology: such as humankind for mankind; low income, middle income, and high income for a developed country, developing country, underdeveloped countries, third world; Global North for the West; workers for workmen; workforce for manpower (although they might not actually be blessed with PC synonymity); spokesperson for spokesman; domestic worker or help for a domestic servant; visually impaired for blind; etc.
Then, again, these prescriptions are littered with pitfalls (and pratfalls). ‘Visually-impaired justice’ does not have the communicability of ‘blind justice’. ‘Underdeveloped nations’ are intersectionally wanting in terms of the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) and not merely ‘low income’ (which is why the latter term conveys so little and with such marginal attention to complex socio-politico-economics).
The Oxfam report attracted (as was expected) a tumult of brickbats, mostly for being purblind (there, I breached the PC wall) to reality and complexities and context. (Oxfam had attempted to fob off criticism at the gates by acknowledging that “this guide has its origin in English” and “the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality”.)
Women’s rights activists have criticised the advice to edit out ‘mother’ and ‘father’. (Oxfam’s rather contorted explanation: “In patriarchal culture, social norms around gender result in designated roles for parents that reflect expectations of that gender. Some transgender and non-binary people may identify with these roles. However, some may prefer to use other names to designate parenthood.”) ‘Parents’ indicates plurality. ‘Parent’, while technically accurate, does not carry the descriptive weight of ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Even in single-parent families, children assign the role according to the perceived gender of the parent.
So, what exactly is at work here? Who is the Oxfam report addressing? The report devotes an inordinate number of pages to transpersons and their linguistic determinants – issues centred in the Global North, the fount of the charitability that is Oxfam’s credo, and of considerably less weight in the donee countries of the Global South, where, in many cases, alternative sexuality is embedded in traditional cultures, and words and terms already exist in the vernaculars, not sufficiently woke perhaps, but descriptive and even accepting. Englishes in the Global South mostly run on their own syntactic steam, and adhering to the rapidly-evolving and momentary and even capricious linguistic principles of the so-called developed world is the least of the concerns of these Englishes.
Oxfam suggested that these guidelines were not rules or restrictions – but, then, went on to highlight that “silence is violence” (as if speaking is not) and that “personal is political” (misreading the phrase, “the personal is political”, popularised by the American feminist Carol Hanisch in 1970, by leaving out the leading article). Hanisch’s statement is also read as “the private is political”, which sort of puts paid to Oxfam’s assertion.In short, Oxfam is language policing – of the tertiary forms of English (dialects, topolects, even literary idiolects) – in the service of the origin language and utter acontextuality.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
kajalrbasu@gmail.com