MotherTongue

She looked up from the form she was filling and asked me, “Ma, what is my mother tongue? I need to fill it in the college form.” I told her that since her mother was a Bengali, she should write that as her mother tongue. She thought that a surname which definitely originated from Uttar Pradesh did not add up to Bengali being her mother tongue, so shouldn’t she write Hindi? I told her that was her father tongue and not mother tongue to which she exasperatedly said there was no such word in the dictionary or the form.

The term mother tongue was devised to enable sociologists determine the language in which the person is most comfortable. Certain Bengali poets say that the language in which a person dreams is the true mother tongue of the individual. I have never recollected any speech in my dreams, they are usually driven by imagery, but perhaps I am a less evolved being. If one has had a childhood romance in one’s “para” (locality), school or college, the romantic duo will probably speak the local language prevalent in the environment at that time. However, if one ends up choosing a partner in an environment like a professional program or work place where everyone spoke English, and one is too old to learn a new language for the sake of love, the subsequent progeny of such couples grow up in a predominantly English speaking environment at home. The children communicate with their grandparents and imported maids from the family village through a medium of broken native language and signs until the latter adapt and learn the language chosen by the child.

My Hindi is passable but despite six text books during the West Bengal Higher Secondary Board, which also included a book on Sahitya ka Itihaas, I mix up genders when I speak. This is not very good when I am trying to tick off a person with high speed diction because the person usually takes umbrage to gender changes at each sentence and misses the point of the lecture. At the same time, while we can speak Bengali well, my brother and I cannot read or write the language. This kind of situation arises when the family moves to multiple locations to meet challenges at the work place. The children learn the language of the state in which they study which in our case was Marathi.

While some kids like mine suffer on mother tongue issues due to inter racial genes, other kids in India speak a sad medley of local languages because they scarcely spend time with grandparents and relatives and are brought up in locations far away from where the family originated. Sociologists who may examine such forms should understand that the data captured isn’t very accurate.