Forgetting Mother Tongue
How much time would you require to forget your mother tongue?
The world knows [I really think so!] that I am a ‘Marathi manoos’ and that I love my mother tongue, Marathi, very dearly. At my office I spoke English rarely and addressed my non-Marathi colleagues also in my language. My colleagues and my students make fun of this habit in my absence, but it is okay, my love for my language which I can speak and write well too is too strong to be affected.
So it came as a shock to me when I read that people can forget their mother tongue! [Incidentally, defining mother tongue is a problem in India. With inter-community marriages where spouses cannot understand or speak each other’s language; they prefer to converse in English, and that is the language child learns]. Coming back to our discussion on forgetting one’s mother tongue, I must say that it was completely incomprehensible for me.
The first time I read about it was in Khushwant Singh’s autobiography ‘Truth, Love and a Little malice’. He wrote about a Sikh gentleman he met in Uruguay, but more about it later. The memory of that narration came to me because I read about Hafeeza, a Muslim from Baramulla district who spent seventeen years in a temple at Khatanpur, a village in Rajasthan’s Dhaulpur district. By a freak accident her family which had considered her dead, managed to find her again. She is now not able to speak Kashmiri or local dialect and her family is unable to understand her language! [I have provided a link to her story at the end of this post.]
So it takes at least seventeen years to forget your language completely.
And here is the Khushwant Singh’s story excerpted from his autobiography, equally interesting:
[Khushwant Singh was in Montevideo in Uruguay, and he says in earlier paragraph that Montevideans had never seen a Sikh before.] A most interesting experience took place on my third day in the city. I was standing in the foyer of my hotel when a short, wizened, old man with only one eye, approached me and greeted me with ‘Sat Sri Akal, Signor!’ I answered his greeting and asked him in Punjabi if he was a Sikh. Si, Signor’ he replied in Spanish. To prove it he took out an old, battered British passport and pointed to the photograph in it: it was of a young Sikh in his twenties with only one eye. He pointed to his chest and said in rustic Punjabi, Naon [name], Chanchal Seonh [Singh]. Pay [peo or father] Sohan Seon; Maoo [mother] Gurdeep Kaur; pind [village] something or the other in district Lahore. Then he began to count ek, do, teen, chaar [one, two, three, four] up to ten. Beyond these words neither he could speak nor understand what I said in Punjabi or English. I asked my Spanish secretary to help me out. It was an incredible story. Chanchal Singh had left Punjab as a young lad intending to settle in Canada. At that time he spoke no other language other than Punjabi. The Canadian authorities refused to permit him to stay. He escaped to United States. He met the same fate there and was ordered to leave the country in a few days. He hitch-hiked his way southward through Mexico and Brazil. No country would have him till he reached Uruguay and got a job as a farm labourer. He married a Spanish labourer’s daughter and had a large family by her…..Chanchal Singh, who spoke only Punjabi till he was twenty, could now not understand a word of it – fifty years had completely wiped it out of his memory. ……
I have found that it takes much less than fifty years to erase the memory of a language if one is not exposed to it orally or visually. A Punjabi Muslim businessman [I think his name was Anwar], invited me to dine with him and his Spanish wife. Both spoke English fluently. When she was busy in kitchen I spoke to my host in Punjabi. He had difficulty in comprehending what I was saying. ‘Words sound familiar but I can’t recollect what they mean,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘I have been in Uruguay for twelve years; my work is entirely in Spanish or English. All these years I have not spoken Hindustani or Punjabi to anyone nor kept in touch with them through books or magazines. Now I can neither speak nor understand a word of what you are saying.’ In twelve years the tablet of his memory had been wiped clean of his mother tongue.
Here is the link to Hafeeza’s Story
Strange but interesting!
Vivek
Really strange but interesting!! My mother tongue is Punjabi.. and it makes me feel good if i speak in my language and i do not leave a single chance to speak in my own language as with the language i get my own identity also back…
Forgetting my mother tongue (no confusion there, both my parents and my spouse are Bengalis) will be nearly impossible in my case, as wherever I have lived, Bengalis seemed to be in abundance there.
This post brought back some old memories. When I was in college, some young people went on a 3 month exchange program to the US where they stayed in local families. We had a presentation by these young people on their return.
There were some people, who claimed to have forgotten Marathi in 3 months, and spoke whatever little they did with an American twang. Their families, amazingly , were impressed.
So forgetting, or even trying to forget your mother tongue was a prestige kind of thing for some people.
Disgusting.
Sir, I have come across certain specimen(s)that they chose to converse only in English despite the fact that I have conversed with them in Tamil knowing they are fully bred Tamilians.Strange but such kind do exist.
In 2003, a friend came over home and was slightly disturbed that my son, all of four years was not comfortable in english and was conversing only in hindi, our mother tongue. He advised me, quite seriously, that in line with changing times we must speak to our children in english, which is a global language.
While my wife and I did give it a thought, but things did not change even as our younger kid grew up.
Two weeks after having relocated to another country, we feel glad that we did what we thought was right and that our kids our well connected to their roots. It is surprising how many Indian children around can understand, but do not want to converse in their mother tongue!
Anyway, to each his own. We have our reasons, they must be having theirs!!!!
very interesting. In case of the two individuals who were stranded in other countries with no one to talk to in their own native tongue, I think it quite understandable. However, a 3 month hiatus to forgetting is seriously too hard to swallow!!
The story of Hafeeza is most interesting. Significantly, after 17 years, she recognized her children immediately.
The cases of Hafeeza, Chanchal Singh and the other Punjabi gentleman are different. They indeed had no choice. But there are so many who try to forget their mother tongue. One can only pity them.
It's a mystery why people try to forget their mother tongue on purpose!
In the case of the Punjabi gentleman you have mentioned, I wonder why he had not tried to keep up with his mother tongue by reading books or magazines?
i can relate, for i yearn to speak in Gujarati and Marathi here in Kolkata.. TV is a great way to keep in touch.