Speaking in Tongues

21st February is International Mother Language Day and our blog is hosting a celebration of languages. A series of blog posts by people from different walks of life – sharing their thoughts on languages, memories and more. International Mother Language Day is an observance held annually on 21 February worldwide to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

I recall that at the time, it seemed straight forward to me. Your mother tongue is the language of your family, the language you heard from birth. Your strongest language. The foreign tongue is the language of immigration, of a country you moved to, of learning.

I didn’t think much more about the poem until I moved to India six years ago, and began to reflect again upon the phrase ‘mother tongue’. Living in Chennai, I met colleagues whose strongest language was English, but whose ‘first’ learned language was Tamil. I made friends who’d prefer to write essays in English, but spoke Telugu at home. I moved to Bangalore, and met a family whose ‘mother tongues’ included Gujarati and Sindhi, but who chose to speak a mixture of Hindi and English at home. And I married someone who spoke Hindi exclusively until the age of eighteen, but communicated with me in English. The idea of a mother tongue became a lot more complicated.

Over six years later, and the birth of our daughter three months ago has made me start thinking about mother tongues again. I’m not sure that I’m any clearer about how to define the phrase, but I know that I want her to have more than one of them. I hope that the Hindi songs my husband coos to her, the Bhojpuri phrases she hears from my mother-in- law, and my constant English chatter feel equally comfortable to her. I hope that when she speaks, her first words will be a mixture of all three. And I hope that when someone asks her what her mother tongue is, she won’t know the answer.