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Young World
So what’s your language?
RADHA H.S.
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In India, not a single State is completely monolingual! And almost every child speaks at least two languages.
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Over 800 mother tongues, 22 scheduled languages and primary school education in about 67 languages!
Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury
Melody : Sound of talk and laughter.
The school bell rings. School’s over. Amma! Mama! Aayi! Mayi! Mata-ji! Ammi! Mummy! Papa! Appa! Daddy!
Cacophony, but each parent recognises the child’s yell. We are talking about a typical school, in a cosmopolitan area, in a large Indian city.
India has over a billion people. Over 800 mother tongues, 22 scheduled languages and primary school education in about 67 languages!
Communication
The States of India were divided on the basis of language in the 1960s, but not a single state is completely monolingual. India has no national language, but Hindi is the country’s official language. English has the status of an associate language in India.
Primitive humans communicated via grunts, snorts, hoots and other noises. Groups of such sounds are called sound patterns and those with meaning are words. Our mouths can make many sounds, but each language uses only some of them. As understood by scientists today, humans are the only ones who can string pre-existing words into sentences which can mean new things. Something new can be said and can be understood precisely that way.
Languages interestingly, are associated with certain families like the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asian, Uralic and Altaic, Japanese and Korean, Dravidian, American Indian etc. There is no documentary evidence, but a study of languages clearly shows a common origin.
Both English and Hindi belong to the Indo-European family. The word mother in English is maata in Hindi. This can be traced to mutter in German and matr in Sanskrit. Languages also borrow words from each other. “Cummerbund” is from Hindi meaning “that which is tied around the waist”. Words could also be a blend like brunch: from breakfast and lunch. Automobile is a hybrid word, Auto is from Greek and mobile from Latin.
Mother tongue and many more
In some parts of Europe and India children are commonly multilingual. The mother tongue need not be the language spoken on the streets. English is taught in schools as a language or is the medium of instruction. If the child has parents who speak different languages, the child ends up learning four languages.
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