I don't dream in Tamil though

While I hadn't planned on it, this post is in a way a continuation of the previous post.  It is also about the role that language plays in our life.  Especially the first language.  The mother tongue, as we referred to in the old country.

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of the jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  So, there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. Quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, who spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi. Even Saurashtra, which was that girl's language!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home.

Which is why in one class during the elementary years, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said. It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things, I tell ya!  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

Anyway, in an European context, such a school would be referred to as an international school.  For us, well, we did not know any better or worse.  It was normal, the way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

I urge you to read the entire essay, which is wonderfully autoethnographic, and which will particularly appeal to the reader who left this comment here.