Languages and Me

Being in a country with people speaking many languages, I have encountered a few hurdles with languages and here are some incidents with how strange it can be in our country.

Case 1:

I was raised in Bangalore until I was 10 and I never attended proper tuition of my mother tongue, Tamil, in school. My parents chose Hindi as second language for me in school as it would be easy for me to if we were to move to another state in the future.

I slowly learned the Tamil alphabet from my mom, newspapers and TV. I started reading and was able to read sentences without much effort. But I didn’t have the practice of writing. Even now I can write Tamil quickly. When we moved to Tamilnadu, for a couple of years I had a school which had an option selecting second language as Hindi. But in 7^th standard I changed school which had Tamil as mandatory language along with Hindi. That's when I started having problems. I had no knowledge of grammar of the language. I had to cope up with the meager knowledge I had. The first monthly test results came and my answer sheet were fully marked in red. It was not just the grammar or spelling mistake. But I had been writing the script incorrectly. Or to be more accurate I was writing in an obsolete script, thanks to the newspapers I was using for my reading practice.

Now for a little history. Periyar, a prominent and famous politician and social activist of Tamilnadu, had proposed changes in the format of some syllables of Tamil during 1950s. It was something like this.

                    

The latter syllables were brought into effect and were been used ever since. 40 years later I had been using the former pattern in my exams, courtesy of the newspapers. It never occurred to me that none of my textbooks had the letters that I was familiar with. Maybe I thought that you can write it in either way. God only knows what went in my mind at that time. (I still don’t know why the newspapers had been using the obsolete script) Much to my teacher’s bafflement, during the paper disctribution he asked me where I learnt from my Tamil from. After that I had to unlearn and learn again the letters. My Tamil teacher was patient enough to tolerate the mistakes I made in Tamil and he is one of my favourite teachers from my school days.

Case 2:

Me and my husband moved to Hyderabad a couple of years before. My husband can speak Telugu well whereas I have just started learning the language. I can understand most of it but can’t reply immediately if someone speaks to me. The house we moved to recently is owned by a Malayali couple and they have been living in Hyderabad for more than 20 years. 

Malayalam and Tamil are very close to each other and share most words. So it is logical for us to speak to the landlady in Tamil and them to us in Malayalam. But since my husband started off in Telugu to the landlady they continue to converse in Telugu. I assume her husband is not that fluent in Telugu as he never speaks in Telugu. Though I understand most part, I stand as a mere spectator to these conversations.

It’s funny how a third language is chosen to communicate when both the parties know much similar language as each other.