NRI Pulse

Perspective

Nuture Your Mother Tongue

By Dr. P.H.B.S. Sarma

In the world of nature all living things including plants and animals have their innate capacity to exhibit their feelings. Further only human race has been gifted to express their feelings among other beings.  For this Language are the one and the only tool available to ventilate feelings.    Globally a mortal can put forth his feelings to perfection so that he/she can disseminate their thoughts to the feelings from the deep core of heart in mother tongue only.    A person can learn any number of languages, but he expresses happiness, sadness, pain, a state of euphoria in ones’ mother tongue only.  And this is an accepted fact.

Globalization has pervaded in all the continents and has made the dream of WHOLE WORLD as ONE FAMILY as desired by our ancients close to reality.  TV, Video conference and Internet have made the world with no barriers for inter personal communication.  A person can communicate with another in an effective way by the available resource of communication.

As a consequence there has been a sea change in the mind set of citizens round the globe to move to distant parts of the world in terms of employment and trade.   With latest advances in transport, we are able to reduce the journey time months and days to hours. This has widened the scope of immigrants to come back to the place of their residence frequently.

Moving away from narrow and parochial thinking of the past, all the countries of the world have realized the importance of mutual cooperation and international understanding and are implementing the same.

As a result of the above factors, the requirement of a common language has become a vital necessity.  It is an indisputable fact that English language has achieved almost the status of Diaspora.

If the present dent of English does not only continue but grows further, the position of mother tongue is abysmal.  Children of immigrants are not in a position to speak mother tongue.  And even if they venture to speak, it is a mixture of English and mother tongue.  Our rich culture and tradition are embedded in native language.  Let not the readers conclude that author’s view is that English usage is to be lessened or to be side tracked and only mother tongue should exist.

Change the law of the land, and every change like the two sides of a coin, for instance common language like English too has its good and bad effects.  The main intention of the writer is to bring to lime light, the gross negligence of our mother tongue.  If the same situation persists with regard to usage of our mother tongue, it will vanish from this universe as like the contemporary usage of Sanskrit.   Sanskrit from times immemorial is christened as the language of Gods.  Now Sanskrit has been labeled an ornamental language.

A poet, critic, lyricist  Hrishikesh Mukherjee who is fondly addressed as the Tiger of Bengal used to write poems in English and Hindi and achieved international eminence.  When leading Hollywood producer questioned him as to ‘how he could pen such beautiful poems’; Mukharjee replied that ‘I basically think in my mother tongue and translate into English, Hindi’ and that is the secret to his success.

It is easy to learn one’s native language.  Further lot of awareness and easy comprehension can be achieved in a creditable way even science and technology when we learn in our own dialect.  Japan and Germany are classic examples to be implemented by a majority of the countries of the world.  It is useful to learn Science and technology at primary and higher secondary level in native language without neglecting instruction in English.  And one should enrich their vocabulary of the native language.  The efforts of the organizations formed by immigrants are to be appreciated.

Even though, we like our mother tongue, we have to accept English as common language.  As in 2/3rd of the countries of the world, English has to come to stay as official language of communication.

The author opines that if the current situation  of gross neglect of mother tongue continues, we may not have for  the future generations a language of one’s own and the coming generations will never pardon us for this.

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