There was an interesting exchange of emails between me and JMB a few weeks ago. She had suggested at that time that it would make a good blog post. It has taken me some time but here is the post about that.
Since it took me a long time to think about and compile this, I have reproduced parts of the emails here…
From JMB’s first email…
I was thinking when you commented on the post about my granddaughter (this is the post that she’s talking about) that you must have some experience with bilingualism in your family. How has it worked with your daughter? I assume you speak Tamil at home and she goes to school in English. What has your experience been with her?
I always assumed that my granddaughter would speak Italian with her father and English with her Mum (although being a French teacher she has introduced that into the mix as well, but not in too big a way yet) from the beginning. It hasn’t worked out that way, although it may eventually, unless she rebels at the Italian later when peer pressure is such a heavy influence.
The following is from my reply to JMB, mildly modified for the purpose of this post…
Talking of languages in a multilingual society like ours is usually confusing.
Actually, my family is theoretically trilingual 
My wife P & I are basically of Kannada-speaking stock. But both of us were born in Tamil Nadu, as were our parents and grandparents and a few generations before that. Our families speak a kind of dialect which is very different from the original Kannada. It probably is like the difference between Cajun-French & the original French.
I do not speak Kannada very well. I am very comfortable with Tamil and English. So is P. Most of our private conversations are in a mix of what is semi-officially recognized as Tan-glish - a pidgin of Tamil + English. I speak Tamil with my parents. P speaks Kannada with hers.
Our daughter, A grew up in a neighbourhood which is predominantly Tamil-speaking, so her main language of communication when she started talking was Tamil. We tried to teach her Kannada, but as we are not proficient speakers, we could not stick to that. Both sets of grandparents try to converse with her in Kannada, but she invariably responds in Tamil so they usually end up talking Tamil to her.
Now that she’s in second grade, her school’s rules and peer pressure are forcing her to use a lot of English. She just about manages to make sense in English, though her syntax and grammar are very mangled, to say the least.
We try to encourage her usage of English. I do not think it will be possible for us to make her a fluent speaker of Kannada. She will become fluent in English and Tamil as these are the languages that she is taught at school and what she uses to converse with her friends.
English is the medium of instruction in her school for all subjects and Tamil is the official second language. The school also gives an option of a third language for older kids (I think for children in the fifth grade and above).
For her third language, we will probably opt for Hindi, which is the main official language in India. There are 22 (yes, twenty-two) official languages in India and the supposed imposition of Hindi is hotly disputed, mainly in the southern non-Hindi-speaking states and especially so in my state of Tamil Nadu.
Additionally the fact that some of her best friends in school and in our neighbourhood speak Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu at home, makes me wonder that the kid speaks at least one language properly.
In her reply to my email JMB said…
I should have realized that it would not be so simple for you. You must laugh at people from Britain and the States who maintain their monolingualism with such determination. Although I suppose it is better than it used to be, but not much.
I think the British are a little more justified in sticking to their monolingualism than the Americans. The UK has had a large-scale influx of multi-ethnic immigrants only in the last fifty years or so. It is only in the last decade that the mainstream media and politicians in the UK started using ‘multi-cultural society’ a lot.
Should we thank New Labour for that?
And there has been no real challenge to the primacy of English in the UK. There has not been a strong linguistic movement (that the external world knows of) to popularize Gaelic, Welsh or Irish. A long and turbulent history of francophobia has kept a culturally rich language out of England and most of her erstwhile colonies with the exception of Canada and few African countries that were Anglo-French colonies.
The Americans have no excuse. The entire country is made up of immigrants. They should have by all rights developed into a proper multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural society.
I do not mean to say that American society is not multicultural.
What I meant was that languages other than English should have acquired importance at the national level in the US by now.
Over the last few weeks, I have been reading many articles in newspapers and magazines on the occasion of India’s 60th Independence Day. One idea which struck me (I’ve forgotten where I read it or I would definitely have linked to that interesting article) was the comparison between India and the European Union.
The similarities are many. India is a continental-sized country with a variety of ethnic groups and languages that rivals its geographic diversity.
Just to cite an example from my life, there was a resident from Jalandhar (where he finished his medical undergraduate degree) undergoing radiology residency in the hospital in Coimbatore where I completed my radiology residency. That is a distance of a little more than 2500 km (1550 miles).
Everything about the two respective states, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, are different. Different landscape; the people are of different racial backgrounds - Punjabis are Indo-Aryan, tall & fair-skinned, Tamils are of Dravidian-origin, dark-skinned and not so tall; different languages; different culture.
They even eat different types of food. The Punjabi cuisine is predominantly wheat-based and mostly non-vegetarian. Tamil cuisine is predominantly rice-based and is (according to Wikipedia) “one of the oldest vegetarian culinary heritages in the world.”
It was the first time he came anywhere to south India. Needless to say, he had tough few weeks (or months) of adjusting to the local food and customs.
An equivalent scenario in Europe would be that of a Greek doctor undergoing radiology residency in London.If India had not been a single unified nation, these two states in all probability would have had as much connection in day-to-day life as Greece and England in the pre-EU days.
Another point that I want to stress is that I don’t laugh at anyone for being linguistically challenged. The teachers in the two schools that I went to between first and tenth grades tried their best to teach me Hindi and failed miserably. That is one language which I’m now sure I will never be able to speak or write with any kind of ease forget fluency.
I have come across barely literate street vendors in Mangalore who, because of their city’s unique demographics are very fluent speakers of five or six languages.
Mangalore is a port city in the west coast of peninsular India in the state of Karnataka very close to its border with Kerala. The city is known for its many medical and engineering colleges which attract students from all over India and the Indian diaspora especially from the USA, Malaysia and Singapore.
I did part of my radiology residency in Manipal (about 75 km from Mangalore) and spent a few months in an associated hospital in Mangalore.
Almost every shop-keeper in Mangalore can communicate in Kannada, Tulu, Malayalam, Konkani and Hindi with a smattering of English and Tamil.
JMB also goes on to add…
I have always wanted to speak another language really fluently and have never really mastered one well enough to suit me. I did study French for years in high school along with Latin and had a certain fluency in French for a while but unless you use a language constantly it slips away. Even though we are officially a bilingual country and everything has English and French on the label, so I can read French quite well, you hardly ever hear anyone speak it out here in the West. I have also studied Italian for years and still take class once a week in term time. But unless I go to Italy for an extended period it also is very hard to maintain any kind of fluency with that too.
I agree with her about using a language constantly to retain fluency.
I used to know a lot of Malayalam when I was in school and medical college (in and around Coimbatore, which is very close to the Tamil Nadu - Kerala border). I even taught myselft to read and write Malayalam.
But now that I’ve moved to Salem, which is more in the interior of Tamil Nadu, I don’t come across too many native speakers of Malayalam to practice on. I fear my Malayalam has become rusty now.
I just realized that this has become a very long post
I’ll stop now.
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I think this is an excellent post Vijay. Not only has it highlighted the multilingual nature of your everyday life but it shows that while we all think of India as one country it is in reality a series of kingdoms forced together by the Moguls before and then by the British occupation and then united in their desire to be independent of the British. Is it truly unified? Are there problems? Is it like Canada, which is one country but stirred up every so often by the Quebec Independence Movement? Am I totally off the wall with this thought?
As to the US making the learning of other languages a priority because of immigration, it hasn’t happened in Canada, although multiculturalism has always been practised here, not the melting pot philosophy of the States. In the western Canada, many courses in the Asian languages are offered and we have many Asian TV stations, but I think that unless heritage is involved people only dabble in Mandarin or Hindi briefly the same way people dabble in Italian or Spanish because they are going on vacation to one of those regions.
The big difficulty for us on the North American continent is distance. To practise the foreign language involves travel to far off places. Even with French in the west, we don’t have very many French speaking people living here, although TV and radio is abundant due to the country’s strong bilingualism policy. Even after years of French immersion schools we have not advanced much with producing truly bilingual people here in the West.
In places like California and Texas and other southern states, Spanish is spoken more and probably more Americans learn it and can communicate in it well. It certainly is the most prominent foreign language studied in schools where my daughter is in New York. They struggle to maintain French and only the exchange program keeps it going. Of course I should not presume to speak for those in the States, but this has been my experience when travelling in those parts myself and from what my daughter has experienced as a language teacher.
This is a very long comment, so I’m done here. I hope I haven’t made any seriously incorrect statements.
regards
jmb
What a wonderful post Vijay.
It always amazes and shames me that so many other people become multi-lingual and in the UK generally we do not. I remember when I went on an exchange trip about 25 years ago to Germany struggling in German and the whole family I was staying with speaking fluent English.
I don’t know whether it is a subconcious throwback to the colonial days and the arrogance of ‘everyone will speak English’. I think we have a distrust of anything that isn’t British which keeps everything else out of national use. Although, there has been a change in the cultural mix in the past years, more so in the last decade, this underlying distrust prevents the integration of these cultures leaving them as isolated pockets. That said, the earlier influx have integrated and are seen as part of British society and its now the newer influx that are distrusted, so we do change but slowly. So maybe slowly other languages will become more accepted and even mainstream rather than just ‘available in other languages’.
Regards,
Ian
Interesting post Vijay. There is a huge push now in our U.S. elementary schools to teach Chinese and Arabic - this is something new. I believe we will be implementing it this year, that was the plan at any rate. There is an incredible movement for emphasis on Science and Math as well. We are realizing the world is changing, and we are trying to prepare our future generations to compete in the world around us. Children learn other languages so quickly, compared to adults. Interesting post.
JMB: Thanks for suggesting this post and for the comment.
Most Indians would agree that we have to thank (?) the British rule for giving us the idea of a united India.
There is no question that India is truly unified. We do have a lot more of the lunatic fringe who demand a ‘land of their own’ in all corners of our vast country. There are quite a few ‘insurgencies’ and ’struggle-for-homeland-stuff’ going on at the moment. Most notably in Kashmir and the Northeastern states. More than the people who want to break away from the Indian union, we have people who are fighting for their own unique identity within the union. We have multiple small-scale insurgencies by groups fighting for linguistic, tribal or sociological identities.
When you say ‘heritage’ I think you mean the way of life i.e., culture & customs. I agree. A language thrives in the appropriate milieu.
The ‘Melting Pot’ philosophy may not be such a good idea if you don’t have a basic foundation of beliefs or customs in a country. The American experiment is still ongoing and not everyone will agree that it has been a success.
Ian: Thanks for the comment.
I think most of the English-speaking world has to thank the British ‘arrogance’ for their knowledge of English. I agree with you that things are visibly changing in the UK now.
I read something interesting a few days ago. Churchill said ‘The sun never sets on the British Empire.’ It is now safe to say that the sun never sets on the Indian diaspora.
Vijay! This was great! I really enjoyed it. Coming from a bilingual culture (Franco American) I could really relate to what you were saying.
About another language becoming prominent in the US - I think that you can say that Spanish has. It’s spoken more and more widely all the time, since it seems to be a language of choice in the schools. Many non-Hispanic Americans are fluent in Spanish.
Americans, however, tend to have a blind spot where multiculturalism is concerned - particularly in the area of language. It was an eye opener for me when I traveled, and realized how many people in foreign lands had learned English … and could converse with me. That speaks a bit about Americans … shouldn’t we be learning the languages of the places we visit rather than expecting them to speak ours?
Your post wasn’t too long, Vijay! It was great. You answered a lot of questions I would have loved to ask!
Vijay, that was a great post. Such posts serve to remind us every now and then how united we are in our diversity.
Living in a university campus gives you an experience of “miniature” India. The building we live in has six apartments - we are a tamil family, my ground floor neighbour is a Bengali, on the first (second to Americans) floor, there is one tamil family and one Malayali family, and on the second (third to Americans) floor, we have a Telugu family and another Tamil family.
And we all speak to each other in Tanglish - a mixture of Tamil and English !