How Do Learn English With Tamil?

With English being the preferred language for communication in professional, social and personal, how important is it know other native languages?

• How can we ensure the survival and growth of our languages if we prefer to speak and teach only English with our kids? I ask this question because I see these days most people prefer to converse in English even though they have the same mother tongue or know other local languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali. In cities at least, English has become the preferred language in most spheres of our life, be it the district collector or the vegetable vendor selling in a push cart. Now my question is by conversing in one language only, are we not creating a generation who would not be able to appreciate India's diversity and enjoy spoken/ written art in other languages? Sometimes it is difficult to express our feelings everything in English because we cannot get the nuances correct in English. This directly affects the quality of the conversation and we may not get full satisfaction out of it. Let me take the example of a child whose both parents don't have the same mother tongue and talk only in English. A child growing up in such a house may not learn either of his parents languages and end up talking only in English. If the same child goes to a English medium school where they do not teach any other language, the child will end up speaking only one language. Will this child not miss out on one of the most common gift an Indian enjoys of being multi-lingual? In a second scenario, this same child may pick both his parent's mother tongue and pick up an additional language spoken in the locality. This child will end up speaking four languages and thus enjoy music/ movies in four different languages. If he learns how to how to read/ write English, he will enjoy the languages even more and some day contribute in its literature and thus ensure the survival of the language. Please don't mistake me to be a hater of English because I love it and can express myself best in it. I just love different languages and am fortunate enough to understand five languages and enjoy music and movies in all of them. The pleasure I get from knowing these languages makes me wonder about the fun missed by those who speak one or two languages only. I would like to ensure languages are protected and encouraged to grow so that we enjoy their songs, poetry and stories. I am asking this question with reference to English in India, but I feel the same can be applied to other languages in different regions as well. So please feel free to give your views.

• Answer:

  I am a born and bred English speaker, and I take great delight in the language and its amazing diversity of words and huge strengths.  On behalf of the English language, I apologise to non-native English speakers who have had to learn such a complex tongue.  My journey has been remarkable:  it started in a world where French was the intertnational language of diplomacy and had to be learned.  If one wanted to get into university, one had to have Latin at ‘O’ level.  And for science, an understanding of German was important.  No doubt, those wishing to pursue a career as an opera singer would need to learn Italian, but that was not on my life plan.  Now that my journey is in its later stages, I have come to live in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.  When I arrived here, I started to learn the language - hugely difficult for many Europeans because it is tonal and a word expressed in the wrong tone can mean something comprehensively different to the meaning one intends - and sometimes something hugely embarrassing!  I soon found out that it was necessary only to have sufficient grasp of the language to get by in the market or whilst travelling.  A rapidly growing  population of the Lao spoke English to a much higher level of command than I could every hope to gain in Lao.  And, in Laos, there are 49 officially recoginsed ethnic groups, which share between them some 85 officially recognised languages.  Not bad for a country with a population of less than  seven million.  The official policy is that all education is conducted in the Lao language, which disadvantages a huge number of children whose mother tongue is not Lao.  I asked a friend of mine, who is expert in the ethnic groups of Laos, whether there was a danger of the minority languages dying out and he affirmed it.  Should we not be collecting a complete record of all of the languages, now?  I asked.  Why?  he replied.  What would be the point?  Most of them do not have a written form.  He told me of the improbable number of world languages and the number that die out every year.  How would we collect them?  What would we do with them?  And, especially, what would we do with the collections when nobody can speak or understand many of those languages any more.  On the other hand, my wife, who is Lao, was set a project once to write an essay on the advantages of a multi-lingual society - in the Lao sense of having many languages.  We discussed the topic and she was greatly in favour of numerous languages.  We discussed the basis of inter-human understanding, and its dependence on being able to converse in a common language.  The more people that can talk together in a tongue that all comprehend, the greater the prospects for understanding.  The ultimate in misunderstanding would be a population is which everyone spoke a different language and nobody could understand what anyone else was saying. They say that, if you cannot read such classics as the Rubaiyat in its original tongue, you miss important parts of its meaning - even though the FitzGerald translation is one of the most beautiful pieces of our language!  On the other hand, English is one of the most dynamic languages and it is continually adopting and adapting from other languages.  If there is not a word that does the job, then English steals one from elsewhere, and this is one of the things that gives it its great strength.  It is organic and vigorous.  Quite how the process works I am not sure - I have a friend in Manila who wants the word ‘heartual’ to be introduced, to match intellectual, spiritual, visceral, etc.  I am working hard on her behalf!  (Please note!) Because of the organic nature of language, I don’t think that there is any real answer to this question.  What is happening is happening.  What will happen, will happen (even if that means that some version of Chinese becomes the future world language) and one cannot legislate on the matter, Canute-like.  The French have adopted a system of ‘Daddy knows best’ and try hard to keep their language ‘pure’, which means disallowing any imports:  thus one gets the official courrier electronique or message electonique in place of the simple email.  But, until 1984 finally arrives, language is one of the most democratic institutions in the world, bowing to popular usage, even in France.