The most obvious argument against language imposition
How important is it to have a mother tongue? The question seems silly — it's not as if children have a choice — but it is anything but. Ask anyone who was born speaking one language, but acquired another later — by choice or circumstance — and mostly uses the second.
Ask a Chinese exchange student in London who writes “Grammarly”-approved English prose but struggles to parry a classmate's teasing with witty retorts. Ask a Spanish expat in Tokyo who breezed through six Japanese courses, but still finds her mind running a Catalan translating app while arguing with her landlord. Ask a Pakistani professor of German who remembers entire pages of Goethe or Rilke, but feels left out in a group of twenty-something Berliners dealing in slang.
Indians, of course, need only pop over to a city in a neighbouring state to have similar experiences.
A vast number of them (but still only an elite minority) speak at least three languages well: Hindi, English and one of many regional languages. Some use all three in the course of a single day; they understand tacitly what it is like to encode the world in multiple mental dictionaries and invent utterings that would outrage the purist ("Side ho jao, bhaiya."). And unlike monolinguals, who do not have the luxury of comparison, they probably know what it feels like to have a preferred language.
A couple of weeks ago, academic Garga Chatterjee explained in an op-ed how a southern Indian movement against the imposition of Hindi helped native speakers of other Indian languages climb the social ladder (by using English). "All over the world," Chatterjee wrote, "the imposition of someone’s language over someone else is a way to create various classes of citizens". The words ring true in my mind — but I'm not thinking about jobs or ceilings on upward mobility, but about the mental experience of language.
I was born in Madras to Tamil parents, but I've spent most of my adult life learning and teaching French. I remember coaching my tongue pitilessly to sculpt columns of air into elusive syllables; it now performs the task with seamless ease. These days, in fact, when I interject a word of English into a torrent of French speech, I produce alarmingly Clouseau-like noises.
But I now understand that no amount of practice can sear the language of Voltaire and Proust into that distant corner of my mind where Tamil, my mother tongue, reigns supreme. It's interesting: I don't speak Tamil as well as I do English or — in some ways — French. My European vocabularies are larger, for instance. But my jokes in French will always seem borrowed or rehearsed, my anger never really raw and primal, and every act of conversation will bear the subtle mark of performance.
Like an equation condemned by design never to touch an axis, I can only ever trace the curve of near-native fluency.
If this is the fate of a sworn Francophile, imagine the plight of the reluctant learner.
Humans deserve the comforts of a native tongue and its culture — the near-simultaneity of thought and expression, the tacit understanding of unspoken meanings, the purity of accent and emotion. It is the space available for this simple joy of life, this cornerstone of personhood, which language imposition threatens.
A nation which imposes an language on its people risks becoming a nation where some citizens can enjoy being themselves all the time, but others can share truly authentic expression only sparingly — with friends and family after work, in contemplation of art and literature, or perhaps, in the pages of a diary.
Of course, it is possible to live this way even when an imposed lingua franca doesn't exist.
For example, nobody forced me to move to the Delhi area, where my (rapidly lessening) ignorance of Hindi is an unending source of comedy, and where I only get to speak Tamil during the occasional phone call. But I chose to come here, and know that it is wise to learn to adapt. On the other hand, a Bengali speaker whose job and finances require her to move to the Tamil hinterland may bemoan circumstance — but that is all she can blame.
Indeed, such twists of fate may become increasingly avoidable. No one born in our century, in fact, should expect to get through life in a linguistic comfort zone — the world is far too connected and open today. From migration to marriage, from job requirements to hobby vacuums, there's always a good reason to teach your tongue some new phonetics, and expand the thesaurus between your temples.
At the same time, it is wonderful to have a linguistic comfort zone. It is one thing to be denied this right by life's whims. It is another to watch it obliterated as a matter of national policy. Mother tongues, and the refuge they offer the human spirit, matter.