Monday, April 17, 2000
Language
Man From Matunga"Man from Matunga" lives in Mumbai, India and expresses his angst and pleasures through words |
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Our former Indian Prime Minister, Mr. P V Narasimha Rao, knows 17 languages. An average Swiss citizen may know four languages. Most educated Indians speak at least three languages.
I studied in English. A legacy of British rule, the best education in India is obtained in English-medium schools. And though the government will never accept this fact, the official language of the country today is English. English is used for all official communication, it is the language of commerce and all higher education in medicine, engineering, etc. is in English.
We have a large number of ethnic groups, languages and dialects in India. Though Hindi, spoken by the majority of people in India especially in Northern India, is the official language of the country, not every group agrees with this official diktat. This is so especially in Southern India. In this setting, a language thrust upon us from outside with no particular ethnic group claiming it to be their own, makes English an ideal binding language for the entire nation.
In English-medium schools therefore, at least three languages are usually taught. English, because it is the medium of instruction. Hindi, because it is the national language. And the local language if the official state language is not Hindi, which is the case in more than 50% of the states in India. In Mumbai, which is the capital city of the state of Maharashtra, Marathi is the third language. People like me, who are not Maharashtrians, need to know a fourth language, our mother tongue, which in my case happens to be Gujarati.
Apart from these four languages, I also learnt French for four years. In high school, from the eighth standard onwards we were given a choice between Marathi and French. French with its well laid-down grammar rules is a "scoring" subject in exams and so a whole lot of us took up French. This continued in junior college. Unfortunately, we were never really taught how to speak French, only how to read and write, which we could do exceedingly well and I can still remember learning by rote, the verb "etre" and its "je suis, tu es, il est, etc".
I don't handle all languages equally. I am most comfortable in English, followed by Hindi. I can think in both languages and swear equally well in either of them. I speak Marathi reasonably well, but do not read it so well. I speak Gujarati well, but my reading and writing abilities leave a lot to be desired. All the languages have different scripts, though Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati are somewhat similar, and use the Devanagiri script with a few modifications.
The particular language I use depends on the situation and the person opposite me. My wife and I converse in English, as do most of our friends. With my parents and family, it is a mixture of English and Gujarati. When we talk to patients, it is in English or in local languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.
Knowing multiple languages has its advantages.
I remember the time we went to the Zoo in San Diego. There was a long queue for tickets and we killed time making fun of the people in front of us or in the neighboring line. We spoke in Hindi or Gujarati, confident that no one would catch on. It can backfire though. A cousin of mine from Toronto was roughing it out through parts of Gujarat. He can pass off as a white man and in the bus that he was travelling, some Gujaratis made fun of him in Gujarati. You can imagine their embarrassment when he suddenly talked back to them in their own language.
Its amazing though how many of us can switch from one language to another effortlessly. I never thought this was significant, until I started travelling and realized that a large part of the world knows only one or at the most two languages. I remember this joke about two Englishmen in Switzerland who were accosted by a man asking for directions. He asked questions in German, Italian, French and Spanish but the Englishmen could not understand what he wanted. When he went away disgusted, one of them commented,
"Wow! He knew so many languages."
The other one said, "So what! That didn't help him with his problem, did it."
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