Multilingual Dreams

A friend asked me recently, “What languages are you most comfortable in?” “English”, I said, regretfully.

Growing up, I spoke three languages: Kannada, Tamil, and Hindi. Kannada is my mother tongue and the first language I learnt to speak. I still speak it with my family. I spent the first four years of my life in Tamil Nadu and learnt to speak Tamil fluently. Then my family moved to a Hindi-speaking part of India where nobody spoke Tamil. I learnt to read and write in Hindi as I was forgetting Tamil. Soon, I forgot how to speak Tamil entirely. I spoke exclusively in Hindi with friends, which continued until I was eighteen.

I moved to Bangalore to attend college and the lingua franca on campus was English. The switch to speaking in English with friends in college was seamless. The years of English-medium education and reading books in English for pleasure had prepared me for it. Since then, the language has taken over most aspects of my life, aided by the fact that I have lived in English speaking countries for nearly a decade. English is what I use for casual conversations. I communicate in English at work. I read for pleasure in English. I write in English. When I pay attention, even my thinking seems to be in English.

I considered myself a multilingual since as far back as I remember. I was proud of being multilingual. But I sometimes wonder if the term currently applies to me. I can hold a conversation in Hindi and Kannada but my vocabulary in both languages has shrunk and English often creeps in as I am grasping for the right word. It seems that without me noticing, English took over my brain one neuron at a time at the expense of other languages. I tell myself that if circumstances changed and I had to use either Hindi or Kannada exclusively, I would pick up fluency right back. For now, I have started listening to audiobooks in Hindi and Kannada. It is slow going sometimes. I frequently stop to look up words or phrases. But the audiobooks allow me to make space in my mind for a language other than English. For the duration of the audiobook, I am inside a world created in another language.

Even as I argue with myself on whether I can call myself multilingual, I would like to think that growing up with more than one language has wired my brain in a certain way. I have an abiding interest in languages and the cultures they represent. I am constantly trying to pick up patterns and phrases when I listen to familiar and foreign languages. The idea of learning a new language does not intimidate me. I have learnt new languages as an adult and become fluent in one (Spanish, with about three years of study and a year of living in Spanish-speaking Latin America). Irrespective of cognitive benefits granted by exposure to multiple languages, being able to access the worlds created by more than one language is a pleasure in itself.