Raising Readers With Multilingual Books

I have read extensively to my 4.5 year old. His vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds

from the age 2 to 4 thanks to the amount of chapter books we read starting young.

There were days when we’d spend 1.5 hours or more reading at times and we

welcomed holidays too!

I grew up as a child of a mixed language marriage. While that looks great on the

outside, the common tongue my parents had was English and my brother and I grew

up living in Mumbai but knowing only English fluently with bits of Hindi, Marathi

and Gujarathi thrown in for effect. I still feel that though Marathi is not my mother

tongue strictly speaking, my parental grandmother is the one person who un

wavering in her approach answered back in Marathi during every conversation and

I cannot help but remember her fondly every time I hear or speak it. Language is

that powerful!

My children are also products of a mixed language marriage where my husband is

South Indian and very fluent in his language, and I am Gujarathi / Marathi and fluent

in neither. As a result of which my kids only hear English around them and hindi is

spoken by the help, which they have picked up and can speak.

From very early on, my first son – now 4.5 – started to speak hindi to anyone who

waited on tables or drove cars. When we travelled to London when he was 20

months old I heard him switch to hindi when he spoke to anyone who was serving

us. That’s when my husband and I caught on that he thinks that English is what you

speak to some people and hindi to a certain set of others, compounding the very

elitist attitude that’s been prevalent in India for the past century, and definitely

something we did not want to propagate.

Therefore I set about buying bilingual books. I bought plenty of hindi / English and

Marathi / English books from Pratham Books and wow what a fabulous effect that

had. My son was so fascinated when I started reading in another language that he’d

just stay still and listen waiting on every word. At first he asked, why are you

reading in hindi mamma? Which gave me even more reason to persevere.

Today we have a enviable stack of bilingual books and we pick any of them at any

point fromm amongst hundreds of others as they are just regular books in the pile

and not because they are not in English. There is a normalcy in reading in another

language, a barrier that my spoken language has just not been able to cross.

Books can teach you things on such subtle levels, like language should not be a

barrier and that every language is cool and important. Its not my language, it’s not

your language and to celebrate that we must step out of our comfort zone at times

and read things in other languages.