One of the worst aspects of education is correcting things which do not require correction. An example here would be the correction of pronunciation in any language. A flood of hours, money and energy are spent on getting the right pronunciation of words. People are humiliated rebuked and laughed upon for mouthing the word wrongly. But why this chronic obsession? Why not let people speak the way they want to?
A correction in pronunciation is required only if the mispronunciation of the word results in a word that is of a different meaning and produces ambiguity in communication.
For example
In Hindi if someone uses the Pha instead of pa sound it can cause serious errors in meaning.
Mohobbat ke pal and Mohobbat ke phal
The first phrase would mean the moments of love and the second would mean fruits of love
Here we see that an correction is required to save the meaning in the sentence.
On the other hand in English if someone uses the sound issp instead of the sound sp as in
The food is very spicy and The food is very isspicy
Here the change in pronunciation has not produced any deviation in the meaning and hence no correction is required.
In phonology the variation in speech sounds which produces a change in meaning are called Phonemes (the sound pha and pa in Hindi) and the variants in speech sounds which do not produce any alteration in meaning are called Allophones (issp and sp in English). A speaker is only required to take care of phonemes during communication so that the message in the sentence is transmitted and received without the loss or revision of meaning. Allophones can be excused and should be excused.
Language by far is an oral phenomenon, it has evolved orally into dialects and then into a new languages. This has been the case with romantic languages in Europe which came out of Latin and the Dravidian languages in India which were born out of proto-Tamil. At a nascent level a dialect would have been a mispronounced language and then would have emerged into a new language with its own units and protocols. Malaylam initially would have been wrongly spoken Tamil before it became the Malayalam it is today and the wrongly spoken Malayalam in areas like Malabar will be a new language for tomorrow. For such evolution to happen there should be elastic structures in language which can facilitate the process.
An allophone is one such structure. They are the conduits through which dialects emerge, they give language the federal dimension and enhance decentralization. English has evolved into an US version, Italian version an Indian version etc. It is important that these processes are kept alive for the natural progression of the language.
Hence next time when someone “mispronounces” a word which does not change the meaning of the word being spoken, please do not correct them, you may kiss them if you want to, because on those tongues languages are evolving.
