the purpose of language: identification/classification, inclusion/exclusion

The 'papers I read are all awash with details of "the split", with the media digging into every detail with customary relish.

It seems all fingers are pointing to the fatal and irreparable 'middleclass-ness' of the bride-to-be's Mum, demonstrated by her incriminating use of "pleased to meet you"instead of "Hello Ma'am" when introduced to the Queen, followed by a question on the whereabouts of the "toilet" as opposed to the more genteel "lavatory".

I find it interesting (and intensely irritating) when people use language to classify/identify people and box them in convenient niches in their mind.

I've lost count of the number of times I've come across people who speak a particular dialect of a language, dissing others who speak the same language in a different dialect, for their pronunciation, syntax...their obvious "not-like-us-ness."

When I was growing up, learning/speaking one's native tongue in public was considered extremely declasse and people would openly sneer "verrrrrrrrrrrn" (short for vernacular) at those who didn't know better. Kids were fined (a trifle, Re. 1) for speaking native from the moment they got onto the school bus "for your own good", to encourage fluency and a posh pronunciation.

In a kind of inverse snobbery, when I went to college where most people came from a non-English speaking background, seniors would rag one mercilessly if they caught one speaking in English!

Looking back, I realise that each group was trying to make language a tool of forced homogeneity, of identity; of class; of inclusion and exclusion; an extension of their own limited comfort zone.

I'm still exposed to this mental sorting out process, I've been asked numerous times what my "first language" is...meaning did I always speak in English, in preference to my "native" tongue? People express a nasty kind of amazement when my children speak in English and Arabic ...I'm often told: "you've made strangers of your children"...never mind if these same people would willingly pay tutors to teach them the same languages!

Language is a tool of communication/connection...turning it into a tool of contention (my lingo can beat your lingo, my accent is better than your accent!) is abusing it...I often think of the infinite Mercy in the permissibility to recite the Qur'aan in seven ways (qira'at) and its revelation in seven modes (ahruf).

If differences of dialect are good enough for Allaah's Words, why aren't they good enough for the rest of us?