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Tongue-tied?

Have we severed the umbilical cord that binds us to our mother tongue? Or have we simply changed the way we interface with it, asks MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER, on the eve of World Mother Tongue Day

BLOWING IN THE WIND Children not exposed to their mother tongue are deprived of not just communication skills but also a range of cultural experiences PHOTO: AP

Tomorrow is World Mother Tongue Day and as good a time as any to work out if we are the richer or poorer for losing touch with our mother tongue.

In school when life was simple (and more confused), one of the first questions one would ask a new boy or girl would be: "What's your mother tongue?" The smart aleck would reply pink with the accompanying rude gesture.The fun thing about mother tongue was to use it as arsenal for community singing when so many discordant childish voices impartially mauled every Indian language soaring above and below key to shatter the long-suffering eardrums of successive music teachers.

Ambience of languages

Jnanapith Awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy says: "The term mother tongue is not current in India. We live in an ambience of languages. Language can be divided into three — the house tongue that is spoken at home, the street tongue which is the language of the province, and the upstairs tongue which used to be Sanskrit and now is English."

Writer Shashi Deshpande says: "I use different languages for different purposes — English to write in, Marathi to express emotions, and Kannada for functionality." A view reminiscent of the late poet A. K. Ramanujan who spoke English upstairs with his father, Tamil in the kitchen where his mother and aunts spent time, and Kannada on the streets where he played with friends.

Ajit V. Bhide, Head of Department of Psychiatry, St Martha's Hospital, defines mother tongue as "the language that most naturally comes to one". The mother tongue is not so much the language of the mother as the language one learns first, at home before formal education.

With the invasion from the skies and the global village, English has become the language of choice, of power and industry and the one to suffer in the process has been the mother tongue.

"The globalised form of modernisation has created what I call the cosmopolites — who is everywhere yet nowhere," comments Ananthamurthy.

"I find the decline of bilingualism or multilingualism unfortunate," says historian Ramchander Guha. "This is happening among a certain class of people, primarily the urban middle class. Multilingualism is important simply because each language you learn opens up a whole artistic, moral, cultural universe."

"I agree that it is the middle class that is losing touch with the mother tongue," says Shashi. "But it is not something I would hold against them. When parents are from different linguistic backgrounds like mine, then what do you consider as the mother tongue? Parents should make the effort to the language so the child is exposed to one Indian language at home."

Like Ramesh, a chartered accountant who is from Karnataka while his wife, Parul, is from Andhra Pradesh. Their four-year-old son, Ved, speaks to his mother in Telugu and his father in Kannada. "It was not a conscious thing but I have noticed when Ved speaks to me or my parents, it would be in Kannada and then he translates what he is saying into Telugu for Parul," says Ramesh.

Linguistic gift

Dr. Bhide says: "There is an innate ability to learn more than one language, but the faculty can vary in degrees from one individual to another. It is a gift to be able to speak many languages and a rarer one to master a few."

"It is important to teach the mother tongue in schools," says Kannada writer Baraguru Ramachandrappa. "In an increasingly global lifestyle, we need to retain our roots. Also by knowing one's mother tongue, it is easy to gain insights into culture."

A. Giridhar Rao of the Indian Esperanto Federation concurs. "There is plenty of evidence both from our own societies and from research worldwide that mother tongue medium (MTM) education is not only the most effective medium for instruction, but that effective MTM education actually helps in the rapid acquisition of other languages."

But Guha would also warn against the exclusion of English when he says: "Linguistic chauvinism exposes children to a kind of suppression. We should renew our attachment to our mother tongue. But at the same time, to turn one's back on English in this day and age is foolish."

Says Shashi: "A person who is bilingual is a richer individual. If I stay in Bangalore and do not know Kannada, I would feel a certain degree of alienation."

On the other hand, there is Bipin, a software professional who believes that "language is for communication and as long as you can communicate, it doesn't matter which language you do it in. I am from Kerala and can speak Malayalam. Since I studied here, I can read and write Kannada. But that has not opened any doors of culture for me. All I know of Malayali culture is kalaripayattu, which I studied at the Alliance Française, which is all about spreading French culture and language. So go figure!"

Need for dynamism

"There are phrases from Malayalam that I use in English because they are so cool like the one about the stoned rooster," says Meenakshi yet another divorced-from-roots Malayali.

Languages should be dynamic and the Bangalorean that blithely asks to solpa adjust maadi is by default articulating a culture of laissez faire. So make a pact with yourself tomorrow to incorporate a word, or a phrase from your mother tongue into your first language.

Tumba thanks only!

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