This was not always so.
Tamil is my native language. Growing up in Bombay, I spoke it in a stilted way and although my mother taught me the alphabet, remain largely illiterate.
In school, we started Marathi first. I never heard anyone speak Marathi and this was a whole two years before Doordarshan's Bombay station was launched so I had no exposure to Marathi. Suddenly, one day, we were asking Aai to look at the lotus and the next we were reciting Manimau. For the most part, I was swimming blind. That cluelessness remained all the six years I studied Marathi in school, never quite catching up.
Hindi followed and was somewhat easier thanks to cinema. Still, as a native Tamil speaker, I was self-conscious about aspirated sounds and gendered nouns. I think this remains throughout our lives. With my friends, I did three levels of the Rashtrabhasha exams and I will say that despite my self-consciousness and my deficiencies, the coursework of the third exam gave me an appreciation of Hindi that I had not considered.
I started learning French before Std VIII. I wanted to be a diplomat and French was a diplomatic language, I had heard. It was also better taught, taking nothing for granted, so finally, I did well. I learned French for many years in school, college and at the Alliance Francaise. I was once decent at it and am now rusty, but I treasure my ability to read in French and occasionally surprise someone with a word or two!
You notice I have not mentioned English. Even in my Tamil speaking home, everyone read in English. There were English books and magazines everywhere. English was just there, taken for granted. Everyone read in my family so book recommendations (and very rarely books) got handed down.
The other language in the shadow of my family's history was Burmese. An entire branch had done their schooling in Rangoon before the Japanese invasion. They were fluent and one branch famously could only do multiplication in Burmese. I tried to learn phrases from my uncle and though they were pedestrian, I liked to think it was our secret language.
I may not have excelled at language learning, nor pursued literature as my field of work. However, what I treasure, even with the little bit of every language I have learned is the way they allow me entry into other cultural universes and the way they enrich each other.
On short visits, I like to learn how to say 'Thank you' in the local language. Nothing connects you to another human than your brave and sincere if disastrous effort to speak with them in their language. I would say even that our mistakes build bridges.
When I started working in the social sector in Chennai, I brought with me my imperfect Tamil. What was perfect was my wish to connect and communicate. I spoke as I could, accepting the chuckles as well as the corrections as gifts. I was not reviled for making mistakes but indulged. I speak a little better now but I don't hesitate to speak.
I want to say here that I wish I had learnt better and retained more of all the languages I learnt. However, even the smattering of this and that has enriched my life immensely. Perhaps in the years I have left, I will find a way to go back, start over and do better.
Learning languages is very, very important. I am not an educational psychologist or any other kind of expert. But I think that the ability to code switch (that is, to speak a sentence in Tamil and then English and then Tamil again, or any other combination of languages) gives you mental agility.
Knowing multiple languages opens multiple universes for you. Just think of the joys of listening to multiple genres of music! It's like that!
In all the language politics in this country, generations are growing up monolingual. This means they cannot learn beyond what is published in their language or from people speaking other languages.
Learning more than one language allows you to get better at each one. Each one deepens your understanding of the other as you learn a new rule and say, aah, in the other it is...
And this is why it bothers me that so many colleges and universities do not require language learning. The 3-language formula, which now seems discredited, forced us to have some sense of our own regional language. Young people these days know English, and because they only know English, they do not seem to know it very well. Hindi survives this somehow thanks to popular culture. But the divide between those who only know English and those who only know their mother tongue is going to fracture this country further. By sidelining language learning in colleges, we are raising a generation of rootless people who cannot communicate with each other.
There is no age for language learning. Online courses and apps make the opportunity accessible to everyone. At the very least, we can return to what we did in the early years of Doordarshan--watch programmes, news and films in every language! Now we can do that on our phones!
And now I am going to do just that. 😉 I will have fun and I hope you do too!
PS: Sometimes, you write something and it turns out to be a first draft of many other things that you may never get around to writing. (20/1/24)
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