Linguistic twist to post-Brexit tale: Only Rani's 'angrezi' acceptable in Britain

Bernard Shaw’s Henry Higgins would have been stirred by a linguistic twist to the post-Brexit tale. Some person, or persons, unknown put up in a block of council flats in the city of Norwich a notice headed ‘Happy Brexit Day’ and proclaiming “We do not tolerate people speaking other languages than English in these flats. We are now our own country again and the Queen’s English is the spoken tongue here.”

While the poster was hastily removed, an image of it went viral on social media, provoking condemnation. However, according to Shaw’s acerbic professor who mentored Eliza Doolittle, the real lingual ‘hate crime’ is that perpetrated by indigenous users of the language and their “cold-blooded mother of the English tongue”, through the usage of barely decipherable argots such as Cockney, or Scouse, the preferred dialect of Liverpudlians. Moreover, like a light-fingered vagabond, English has unabashedly purloined much of its vocabulary from its erstwhile colonies, as attested by the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary that lists no less than 384 words and terms taken from the Indian subcontinent, including ‘shaadi’, ‘FIR’, ‘history-sheeter’ and ‘Aadhaar’. So, Brexit may come, and Brexit may go, but what might appropriately be called the Rani’s Angrezi boli will go on regardless, in a Britain that is Bilayat.