Language: part deux

“When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds.”
~ Jhumpa Lahiri

This is where I left off yesterday, this is where I begin today. Taking you on a tour, inside our home, on the clunky, colorful vehicle with things dangling out – the metaphor for my language. 

I speak to my kid mostly in Marathi. She replies back only in English. She has done so for the past several years.

Yet in all her English sentences, there are certain words that she uses only in Marathi. She never uses their English counterparts (when speaking to us). She sticks them in English sentences with a happy effortless ease, even if they jut out forcibly – awkward and strange in the English sentence, grammar and context.

“After I do angol (bathe), will you get the zatta (tangles) out of my hair?”

I remember her at a year and a half old, mixing the two languages - adding “ing” to Marathi verbs or taking English verbs and adding Marathi grammatical suffixes to them.

A friend shares how her mother, a non-native English speaker, never spoke to her in her native tongue. She wonders if there remains a missing piece in their relationship since she never spoke her mother’s language. I sense her emotion and feel much empathy for a dear friend, who may have felt like an outsider to this part of her mother’s language (and identity?).

Determinedly, I continue speaking to my kid in Marathi, for most part. She is embarrassed when I speak to her in Marathi in front of her friends. I explain it is simply force of habit. I am ever so slightly hurt. Till she shushes me, takes me in confidence, and whispers, “they will think we’re talking about them”.

I grin in surprise. For I realize we do talk about people in Marathi. When a server bangs the plates, or seems grouchy, I may on occasion, have said, “Hmm… someone’s having a bad day…” not outside earshot, not in English, of course.

Tsk tsk… I suppose Marathi has sometimes been evidence of bad parenting. Since my kid does not always have volume control, or ahem… tact, I have sometimes whispered to her, “speak in Marathi, if you are going to make personal comments about people”.

Bad parenting or not, it does seem a safer bet when your kid is about to utter, “Is that guy wearing a wig?” Full volume, of course.

My husband and I sometimes wonder how monolingual parents parent without a secret language. She speaks and understands English and Marathi. But my husband and I also speak Hindi, which is our secret language to say things we do not want her to hear. It backfires quickly and we notice she is extra alert when we speak in Hindi. She understands the gist of the conversation, if not every word. Moreover it annoys her, so we drop it. There really is no outsmarting our kids.

There is no dearth of stories and instances about language, for we evolve, language evolves, circumstances around us change constantly. For most part, we continue obliviously, in our personal “evolved language”, sometimes we take notice.

The other day, my friend says deluge, as rain and hail rattle the car top. She pronounces it de’luge (day-luje) as in French. “Oh it’s not deluge (de-luje) in English?” I ask.

I laugh as I realize that I probably learnt the word first in French. Bringing it to English, I decide to pronounce it in what I consider the more American pronunciation. “How messed up, is that?” I ask laughing. I don’t want to sound too ooh la la…  and all francais and pronounce it the way I believe Americans would.

My kid corrects my pronunciations, she sighs and gives up – for it is a lost cause.
I find sentences here and there, which could be written better in English. At times I correct them, at times, I let them be. They are often literal translations from Marathi.

I let them be, because I am growingly beginning to understand my clunky colorful messy vehicle. For in the end, I need to write, and I need language to write. And if language is identity, why mess with the individuality – no matter how messy?