What It’s Like to Not Know Your Mother Tongue
Where not knowing your native language can leave you on the cultural outskirts.
Recently I went back to India, where I spent an entire month reconnecting with my family and my country. It was a trip filled with fun adventures, whimsical miscommunications, and otherworldly sights.
India, no doubt, is vastly different than Canada. In Canada, English is the main language. It is also the first language I learned, and the only language I’m fluent in (even though I took French all the way until Grade 12, I can barely hold a conversation). And while I was in India, I discovered that not knowing my mother tongue came along with some barriers.
Unlike many other first-generation Canadian kids, I was not brought up with my parents speaking their native language around me. At six months old, my mom put me in daycare so she could get right back to work in order to earn money for the family. And obviously, the daycare operated in English and that was the language I picked up on.
My mom never spoke Hindi around me, instead choosing to speak to me in English too.
This never really proved to be a barrier for me for obvious reasons. Even when I went to Indian functions, I was able to get by. If aunties ever spoke to me, my mom translated and if I were hanging around with kids my age, we’d all be speaking in English anyway.
However when I visited India this summer, not knowing Hindi definitely had an impact on my trip.
All of my family lives in India and Hindi is the language they all speak. While almost all of my cousins speak English fluently as well, my aunts and uncles speak minimal to no English, save for two. One of my aunts speaks English at an intermediate level and her husband speaks English really well. I stayed with them for most of my visit; we got along nicely.
Often we would go to other family members’ houses to have dinner and meet people I haven’t seen in six years. But almost all the conversations were held in Hindi. To see your family laughing along, having a grand ol’ time and not being able to understand almost any of it really sucks. You miss out on so many jokes, stories, and words of wisdom. I would ask my cousins to translate for me a lot, but the meaning just didn’t carry.
One thing that really struck a cord with me was how often family members told me that if I understood Hindi, how I would have been able to understand how much of a character my late granddad was.
I only met him once: when I was eight years old and on a three-week visit to India. Because of my inability to communicate with him and the fact that I was young, I really don’t recall any memories with him. And it makes me so sad whenever family members relay funny anecdotes about him since I never got to experience those or understand what was going on. Even as my family members were telling me these stories, I’d have to ask my cousins to translate for me.
While I was in India, I also visited the Ganga River in Haridwar — a very holy site in Hinduism. While I’ve been there before, I was really young and I never appreciated it as much as I did this time around. Honestly, it made me realize how disconnected from my religion I was.
Being raised a Hindu in Canada, you attend temple on Tuesdays, you celebrate major holidays, and you go to poojas (prayers/blessings) and all of that is done in the community’s native language (whether that be Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, etc). And while attending or participating in those events/functions, I would always tune out what was going on. In my dumb, young mind, if I didn’t understand what was going on, why bother paying attention?
Slowly but surely, religious functions and events became less important to me. I never really felt the excitement of Diwali (a kind of Hindu Christmas if you will), I stopped wanting to go to temple every Tuesday and whenever my mom would recite prayers, I just mimicked whatever she did without really understanding what I was doing. Now, I don’t even do morning prayers with her.
If someone were to ask me what my religious beliefs are, I would say I’m not that religious. If I had to practice Hinduism on my own, I honestly wouldn’t know what to do. I probably know more about Christianity than I do Hinduism.
But while I was there, I learned so much more than I knew before going to India. My cousins told me sick legends about the gods, and my uncle shared with me morals from the Gita. I became so transfixed. Even just from a non-practicing point of view, it was amazing.
It made me want to learn so much more about my religion.
My uncle gave me the English translation of the Gita and while it’s a start, things are often lost in translation.
This whole trip was full of excitement and happiness, but it did make me realize how disconnected I was from my family, religion, and culture.
