English is a phunny language, but it is having the last laugh

Let me begin by giving you a test. Say this line in your mother tongue, quickly -- without using a single syllable of English: I am going to the market to buy vegetables like tomato and carrot because my friends are coming home for dinner.

Did you get 10 on 10? Did you struggle for carrot? What is tomato in your tongue, by the way?

The same test a few decades back would have been a piece of cake…or gajar halwa.

Back then, Hinglish, Kanglish, Tamglish hadn’t entered our lives or lexicon. English was there, ‘second language’ at best.

Today, those seniors too have to get good at English, and the ‘university’ that gives them this compulsory learning: Their own grandchildren.

It is a common sight, the daily video call when elders try to get a glimpse of their tiny tots growing up in a faraway land, speaking an alien language. That call is the little window of time when the children get to bond with their dada-dadi, ajji-thatha, who try to make sense of the words the kids are saying. They reply, trying to tell children their stories, but realise that replacing raja-rani with king and queen doesn’t feel half as good. They don’t know much English, and the kids don’t know anything but English. There is a disconnect and one more story is lost in translation. Grandpa’s Tenali Rama loses to Doraemon.

A lady who I meet on my morning walk, stopped to show me her delightful grandson on her phone. “Adi must be 3 now, aunty? What is he talking these days?” I asked. “Many things, ma…only thing is, I don’t understand. He talks so fluently in French, you know!” she said a bit wistfully, reminiscing about her daughter in the US, who married a French colleague.

Losing link with one’s own language is like losing a slice of culture every day. Slowly. It is like the peanut butter you started slathering on the kids’ bread, instead of the sugar inside the hot ghee-filled chapati amma made, which used to melt in your mouth.

But the generation that is losing touch with the mother tongue is not to be blamed. Is it their fault really? The school – for which the parents have paid through their nose to be in English medium – bars the children from, and in some cases ‘punishes’ them for, speaking in the local language. TV shows from the West seem to them way cooler than folk songs and concerts in the community. The parents themselves prefer to speak to, love, and scold the kids in English, especially when in public places. There is a shame built around speaking in one’s own mother tongue, as if it is any lesser than English.

Three years ago, at a film festival, I watched a superb Mexican movie I dream in another language. It was about a tribal language called Zikril that has only its last two speakers surviving, both of whom are ripe old men, and sworn enemies. A young linguist from the US arrives to make them talk to each other, just so that the language they speak can be restored to the world.

In India, too, a dialect somewhere is dying every day. Ganesh Devy, founder of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, estimates that India may have lost 220 languages since 1961, based on the Census number of 1,652 mother tongues. Another 150 languages could vanish in the next 50 years, he says.

Luckily, a few people are working to prevent that. Like the Prabha Khaitan Foundation that does ‘Aakhar’ (alphabet) programmes that host authors and poets writing in languages such as Odia, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Magadhi, Rajasthani, Urdu, Arabic and Persian. Kottur Sampath created Sheshamma-Shallamma, a hugely popular and hilarious audio series of two old women speaking about modern life in a forgotten Iyengar dialect.

In February 2010, Boa Sr, the last speaker of an ancient tribal language called Bo, died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures. Boa spent the last few years of her life unable to talk to anyone. How lonely may have that felt, despite an entire language living right inside you!

A language is that fragile. If you don’t speak it, it will fade away. Into the day when we may order “spiced pancake with lentil”, when all we wanted was a plate of masala dosa with sambhar.