In the beginning, God prevented people from understanding one another and working together by scattering them into different regions where they developed their separate languages. This plan seems to have gone haywire as modern technologies, with several inventions, have made language irrelevant in communicating with one another. One of the casualties in the process has been the grammatically correct usage of sentences.
I remember the day I was rebuked by the head of my department when I showed him the mark-list of a test. "If you want to continue in your job, be liberal. Give marks not according to what the students wrote, but what they intended to say."
Like other fields, the examination system worldwide has changed. There was a time when there was nothing like Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), and all questions required descriptive answers in grammatically correct sentences. The trend has changed now, as most questions are replaced by MCQs, where the examinee has to select one of the given answers.
The rot must have started far back with telegrams whose soul was brevity as one had to pay for every word written. Naturally, the message was conveyed in as few words as possible, without caring about grammar. Then social media followed, with messages where the number of characters allowed, including spaces between words, was limited.
Being an English teacher sometimes puts one in embarrassment. Recently, social media have been full of messages thanking teachers for what the students have become. In one of the cartoons, a young man selling pav-bhaji greets his ex-teacher and asks the latter to give him a photograph to put in his profile. The teacher is aghast, and requests the man not to do it, telling him that his coaching class would be finished if people knew what his students had achieved in life.
Many language teachers would cringe at the quality of language used by their ex-students and would prefer if their part in forming their students' lives was not mentioned. Please don't tell people that you were my student, they would plead with folded hands.
Language was never a barrier to those who wanted to migrate to other countries with a different language. I have heard of people migrating to places like Burma to work in road construction and other menial jobs as they could earn much more. Once in a while, they would visit their native places wearing trousers, rarely seen those days. Several Keralites, educated as well as unskilled, still migrate to the Gulf countries. The trend has changed with several workers from Bengal, Assam and other states migrating to Kerala as wages there are much higher than those in their states.
As most traditional coconut tree climbers have migrated to the Gulf countries, these 'guest workers' have taken their places. Recently, I was amused seeing my host struggling to communicate with the migrants in broken Hindi and English.
Speaking English seems to be unavoidable in some sports events, too. The players and the officials try to be good at the language apart from the sport. I was amazed at the speed with which they responded when asked questions in front of cameras. They seemed very fluent in English, speaking it at lightning speed.