Language and Power II: The Secret Tongue of the Shah Kings

In Nepali I have encountered three forms of address that are used in everyday life: high, middle, low. Each has its own word for "you" and "he/she" and its own conjugation. I use the high form with teachers and the middle form with students and friends. As far as I can make out, the low form can be derogatory and insulting or it can be used for your closest friend or spouse. I have heard teachers at other schools tell me that they use the low form when addressing their students, but at my school I have only noticed the form used when the teachers were yelling at two boys to stop fighting.

This is how you say "sit down" in each:

High:            basnus!
Middle:         basa!
Low:            bas!


But if I ever met the former King of Nepal, he would expect for me to say "sit down" this way:

                    basibaksyus!


There is a separate form that is used for the Royal Family and the elite in Kathmandu Valley. But the differences go beyond verb conjugation. For example:

English               Normal Nepali               Royal Nepali

Come here!          aaunus!                         sawaari hoibaksyus!
to eat                    khaanu                          jyunar garibasknu
hand                     haat                              bahuli
shoes                    jutta                              paupos
to say                   bhaanu                         marji hunu


These examples come from a course on second year spoken Nepali that was part of the materials that my Nepali teachers used back when they taught Nepali to Peace Corps Volunteers (before the abolition of the monarchy). My host family, who are Kathmandu Valley resident Chhettries, understood every example and taught me other phrases that I could use in the Royal Nepali court. They told me that it is also the language of certain Indian elites, but in Nepal only people in Kathmandu Valley know it.

This is from Unleashing Nepal by Sujeev Shakya, referring to the Panchayat regime:

"All businesses ran on nepotism and required the special blessing of the royal family in order to effectively start up and function. This was typified in the use of language in particular. The king and royal family members were addressed in a grammatical form that could not be used for common citizens. It contained a lot of Urdu usage and an exclusive vocabulary to describe food, eating, sleeping, and other daily activities. As knowledge of this language was a major advantage in gaining proximity to the power centres around the palace, it functioned as a means of excluding people who were unfamiliar with it."


Indeed, most of the other examples given in the materials relate to seeking favors from the king: nigaaha baksnu (to grace kindly), huknu (to make a Royal proclamation), Tarkyaaunu, (to offer to the king), paaumaa winti chaDaaunu (to make a request to a member of the Royal family), darin baksnu (to pay a visit).

This is a very concrete example of how the knowledge of a language can be very powerful in Nepali society. Because Nepali is the native language of a minority of the Nepali citizens, knowledge of Nepali itself acts in a similar way today, as does the English language.

I asked people in the Valley whether they would still speak this language to the ex-King if they met him today. They said that they still would, as a sign of their continuing respect for the Royal family.

Hanuman Dhoka: XYZ

Dhoka means gate, and Hanuman is an important Hindu deity with the form of a monkey. Hanuman Dhoka refers to Durbar Square, the ancient royal temple complex, but I believe the actual Hanuman Gate is this:

This is the gate. In the center you can see the red statue of Hanuman, dated to 1672.

This is all background information for a story about what happened to me right before I left for Kathmandu last week. My host brother came up to me as I was leaving and told me "Hanuman Dhoka kholdaichha" - "The Hanuman Dhoka is opening."

It took me some time to figure out that this is the Nepali equivalent of "your barn door's open." My fly was down. I find this saying hilarious and awesome. It is interesting to me how similar these two phrases are in terms of imagery. I wonder if any other cultures make a comparison between zippers and barriers holding back beasts or monkey gods.

Language and Power

This is why I am in Nepal:

"There are over ninety-two local languages and dialects in Nepal and over a hundred different social groups based on caste, ethnicity, religion and language. The Panchayat regime's promotion of Nepali, even though it was not the mother tongue of a considerable portion of the Nepali citizenry, created an unfair advantage for those who spoke Nepali. Nepali speakers mostly comprised Bahuns and Chhettri, the top two tiers of the traditional Nepali caste system and the state-imposed Nepali language thus became a symbol of oppression, especially among ethnic and linguistic groups who did not speak Nepali. Although this system effectively instilled Nepali language as the primary means of public communication, even by 2001 only 28 per cent of the entire population spoke Nepali. Equally worrisome is the fact that a number of languages unique to particular ethnic groups in Nepal are in danger of dying today."

This is from Unleashing Nepal by Sujeev Shakya, a book that presents the history and current political climate of Nepal from the perspective of economics. The Panchayat regime of the Shah kings began in the 1950s, and during that time Nepali was imposed as the lingua franca of the nation as the king strove for a policy of one nation, one language, one religion. Many people I have talked to say that the establishment of a lingua franca was one of the few good things about the Panchayat regime, although it did and is doing a lot of damage to the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Nepal.

I am here to teach English, which is also very much associated with the elite in Nepali societies. Most private schools are English medium schools, and those who can afford decent private schooling are almost guaranteed English proficiency, but public school students often have difficulties. Where I am teaching most of the students speak Tamang or Newari, learn Nepali as a second language and English as a third, and so learning English can be a challenge. I am living with a Chhettri family. They speak Nepali natively, but I'm learning Tamang and Newari phrases so that I can interact with the students better.

I also want to interact with the Nepali linguistics community when I can, starting with the 31st Annual Conference of the Linguistics Society of Nepal which will be held this Friday and Saturday in Kirtipur. I just had some official Fulbright business cards printed and I'm about to go buy some pants that don't have toothpaste stains on them. I'll let you know how it goes!

Tihar

I really like Tihar because it reminds me of Christmas more than any other Nepali holiday. It was a five-day holiday at the beginning of November. There is a day for worshipping crows, one for dogs, one for cows, and one for brothers. People paint pathways of red mud all throughout their house and walkways and light candles along them to encourage Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth, to visit their home. There are fireworks and people string up colored lights and children go door to door singing Tihar songs in exchange for money. This caroling 'game' is called Baili Ram on one day and Diosi Re on another; traditionally one day was for girls and the other for boys. On the last day there is a large puja ceremony in which brothers are given ritual protection by their sisters: an oil ring is drawn around them, oil is placed on their head and in their ears, and they are given a special tikka consisting of a thin yellow line with seven different colored dots running down it. The brothers give the same tikka to their sisters, and plates of nuts and fruits and candy are exchanged for money.

My camera has deserted me, so I created a little video of Tihar images and sounds from my laptop's webcam. Here it is.

Devanangreji II

Since the Dashain - Tihar festival season started, I've noticed these Pepsi signs appearing over storefronts. It is an interesting marketing campaign by Pepsi to capitalize on the Christmas-like festivity of the season. Check it out:

da-shaí ti-ha-r

I've never seen iconic "American-style" graffiti like that anywhere in Kathmandu, not in Roman letters or in Devanagari. I guess it is pretty instantly recognizable as American, though. And the figures along the left and right (in the first picture) are all wearing Western-style clothing but one of them is doing a traditional Dashain activity: he is holding a spool attached to a kite. 

The News from Nepal: Blogs and Porn and Teacher's Strikes

Sometimes these blog entries refer to things that have happened a week or two weeks ago. The reason for that is that I generally spend one or two weeks in the village teaching without much in the way of Internet access. But I spend a lot of time talking and thinking and writing, and when I come into Kathmandu for a couple of days I will write up five or six blog entries and then set them to self-post over the course of the next two weeks or so. That way you don't have to comb through massive updates.

Anyway, here are a couple of things that have been happening lately:

Teachers close schools across nation for security

The Wednesday before Tihar break our school closed as part of a nationwide strike protesting the murder of some teachers in the Terai. I was visiting the private school Shangri-La on that day, and that school was not closed; the strike was only for government schools. People tell me that way out in certain parts of the Terai being a teacher is still dangerous because political affiliation and the tactics of revolutionaries are wrapped up into the educational system. For those of you who care about my well-being I feel the need to tell you that this culture is very far removed from my safe little village in Kathmandu Valley, but I still felt the political reverberations. Striking to protest policies or in memoriam people who have passed away is common in many different occupations in Nepal.

Let's talk about porn

The last time I was in Kathmandu I noticed that I couldn't access this blogging service for my account or any of the blogs that I follow. Later I found out that the Nepali government was blocking Blogspot as part of their campaign to restrict pornography to Nepali citizens. Somehow Blogspot and The Huffington Post among others ended up on the list of restricted sites. Interesting stuff going on in this fledgling democracy as the government negotiates civil rights and the policing of the population.

Speaking of blogs, here are two blargs o' note:

Simon's Blog

Simon is my fellow ETA in Nepal. I am losing a slow battle with him over who has the most popular and awesomest of blogs.

Lukas' Blog

Lukas teaches English in China. He is pretty much the same person as me, except stronger, handsomer, better at teaching, and four times as Czechoslovakian.

Morning Assembly

Some images from morning assembly at Shree Udaya Kharka Secondary School:

I also filmed a short video of the morning assembly and added subtitles. I had a lot of fun translating the national anthem into English, although there are probably a couple of mistakes.

That video is here:

Speaking a Foreign Language Makes You Less Intelligent

This is a fundamental truth about speaking a language (learned as an adult), but it is often forgotten. And forgetting this truth can have profound social consequences.

I am fluent enough in the Nepali language that I can hold a basic conversation on most topics, and even excel on a few choice topics (mother language education, food, etc.). But speaking in Nepali I just "feel" less intelligent. It takes me longer to parse sentences and longer to respond. I forget words and mix others up and am often laughed at for some amusing mistake. Thinking is just harder to do. It takes longer and it is exhausting. I would estimate that when I speak Nepali I feel about 60% as intelligent as when I speak English (with German I feel about 80% as intelligent and with Spanish I feel about 20% as intelligent).

When I speak Nepali, I am the same person as when I speak English, but the outward manifestation of my personality can be much different. I may be bolder or I may be more shy, depending upon how I face the challenge and constant humiliation of being forced to express myself in a less intelligent (and oftentimes laughably simplistic) way. That is the discomfort and terror of language-learning, and also its exhilarating challenge.

But oftentimes teachers forget this. They teach language as if it were a skill like long division, and not a fundamental means of expressing oneself. They berate their students for not speaking out in class, while forgetting the terror and frustration that they experienced in their own language classes.

And forgetting this truth can have other societal implications as well. It can lead to subtle mental judgments about the intelligence of immigrants or foreigners. When we hear the foreign-accented speech of our own language, we often do not immediately acknowledge that this person is expending a great deal more mental effort to communicate his or her ideas than we are. This person sounds stupid to us even though they are doing something that requires incredible mental stamina and courage.

Coming from a very monolingual society, this is something I need to keep in mind every day that I teach English. The best remedy for that is to get laughed at by a 10-year-old for mixing up the Nepali word for "the day after tomorrow" with the word for "pumpkin."

Chants: Stressed Grandmas

The lower secondary government textbooks include many games, poems, and chants. As an American faced with teaching some of these chants to Nepalis, I find them to be often silly, occasionally confusing, and in some cases mildly disturbing. But I think they provide a very useful but hidden service to the students. My first week I taught a chant that started out like this:

"Grandma's going to the grocery shop.
One, two, jump, hop."

How would you teach this as a back-and-forth between the teacher and student? How would you pronounce it? I raised my hands like a conductor and waved my hand in time and spoke the first line this:

GRANDma's GOing to the GROcery SHOP
1                         2                        3              4

Imitating me, they responded like this:

GRANDma's GOing TO the GROcery SHOP
1                         2          3             4                5


It took four or five tries before they spoke it exactly the way I did. English is a stress-timed language, and Nepali is a syllable-timed language. That means that in English the rhythm and speed of the language is determined by stress: we try to keep the time between one stressed syllable and the next approximately the same throughout the sentence. The time between "GRAND" and "GO" is equal to the time between "GO" and "GRO," so we have to smush three unaccented syllable together in the middle: "-ing to the."

In Nepali and other syllable-timed languages, the distance between one syllable and another is always equal. You can often hear this in the accent of nonnative speakers of English (this is also true for Hindi and French, for example). It sounds as though they are stressing EV-ER-Y SY-LLA-BLE E-QUA-LLY. So the students imitated me by stressing every other syllable in the sentence.

This is a very difficult thing to learn about English, and these chants are an incredibly ingenious way to teach it to students. However, these exercises are much less useful if the teacher does not understand the intricacies of English rhythm and prosody, which is very often the case. It really helps if you a native intuition about these things. This is one of the reasons why I am focusing on teaching speaking and listening skills while letting the counterpart teachers handle reading and writing.

First Week of School

So after a month of training, a week of observation and then another two weeks of holiday, this week I began teaching at Shree Udaya Kharka School.

How did it go? Well, to start out with, this week was atypical because two of my three counterpart teachers were gone for the week. So I taught class 5, 7, 8, and 9 alone. I also taught impromptu 'guest lectures' to class 10 because the students requested it of me - when a teacher is absent at this school the students end up just sitting in that class alone for the whole period. Apparently I was more entertaining than staring at a blank whiteboard, so that's encouraging.

It is much, much easier to teach alone than it is to teach as a team. When I am alone in a class I can come up with my own lesson plan and follow it through - sometimes I can even speak in Nepali if its needed. But with another teacher I have to negotiate what my responsibilities are beforehand. And this can range from sitting in the back of the class and helping the teacher pronounce words to teaching lessons. Many teachers do not prepare lesson plans because they are teaching directly from the government textbook. But this more difficult work of negotiating with the teachers in the classroom is more important; I am here to be an English language resource.

The classes are usually about 40 students. For the first day in classes 7, 8, and 9 I had each student fill out a flashcard with their name, their village, and the languages they speak. This allowed me to start learning names and lead into a short lesson on adjectives but it also gave me some useful information about the students.

About 50% of the students wrote that they speak Tamang, 10% speak Newari, and a few speak other local languages. Most say that they speak Hindi and about a third say that they speak English. Most wrote two languages, either "Nepali and English" or "Nepali and Tamang" (if they wrote down a local language, they were generally less likely to also write down English). Some wrote three, four, or five languages. One student claimed to speak six: Nepali, English, Hindi, Newari, Tamang, and Pahari. So there should be a lot of interesting challenges.

In Nepal students show a lot of respect to teachers and stand up in front of the class whenever they are called on, so they tend to be very shy when they do answer. They are generally not used to volunteering unless they are the top students in the class, and generally two or three students seem to be way ahead of everyone else. It is often very difficult to choose a random student and coax them into any sort of response. When you intentionally speak only English and they do not understand immediately, other students will yell out Nepali translations. There is no culture of raising your hand to volunteer an answer, and so I played a game with a few classes where they all had to raise their hand if they lived in a certain village or spoke a certain language or had been to a certain destination, to get people used to the idea. The stand-up sit-down move-around games were the most successful, but they are really only appropriate for the younger classes. 

The teachers have been very welcoming. We have an opportunity to talk during the tiffin break. Tiffin corresponds to lunchtime but consists of a smaller snack, the two main meals of the day being eaten at around 9:00 AM and then again in the evening (which is very difficult to get used to because I am never hungry in the mornings). During tiffin, I often go out with the teachers to a local tea shop and eat spiced potatoes and beaten rice and drink tea. Every day I am planning on learning a new sentence in either Tamang or Newari. I've already been taught the lyrics to the Nepali national anthem, a popular folk song, and a popular Nepali rap song entitled Timro Babu (Your Daddy).

So the week was a qualified success. There were quite a few frustrations and more than a couple awkward pauses in front of a silent classroom. We'll see how it goes when my two other counterpart teachers return.