Of First and Second Languages – I

Costica Bradatan‘s essay ‘Born Again in a Second Language‘ made me think my own homes in the two languages I speak: English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani.

Because I grew up in India, English is often termed my ‘second language.’ I, however, describe English as my ‘first language’ because it is the language in which I posses the greatest fluency, vocabulary, and reading and writing proficiency. My reading and writing fluency in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani is on a sharp decline; I have not read a book in Hindi nor written more than a line in it for over thirty years now.  As I noted in a post here some time ago, one of my reading projects is to read three novels in Hindi by the great Indian novelist Premchand; they sit there on my shelf, waiting for me to muster up the courage to approach them.

I grew up in a mixed language household; my parents spoke a mixture of English and Hindi to each other; my father spoke predominantly in English with my brother and myself; my mother, who had a graduate degree in English literature, spoke in both English and Hindi with us, but the latter often took precedence.  The language of the streets around us was Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani but our social milieu, made up of Air Force officers drawn from all over  polyglot India, relied on English. The language of instruction in the schools I attended was English; we learned Hindi as a language in a separate class. The movies we watched in theaters were in English; the weekly Sunday movie was in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani.

So I grew up bilingual, but the combinatorial explosion of language that takes place in a child occurred, for me, in English, because it was the language of instruction in school, the language in which I was introduced to bookish knowledge, and as such, the language in which I began to read outside of school. It became the language in which I dreamed, fantasized, speculated, wondered and schemed. I spoke Hindi with some family members and English with yet others; I spoke Hindi with some friends of mine and English with others; but, when I was by myself and my books, which was a great deal of the time, I thought  and imagined in English. It became, very quickly, my ‘first language.’

I stopped studying Hindi in the tenth grade.  I had, through sheer tenacity, improved my Hindi reading and writing skills to the point that I secured, after years of embarrassingly bad performances, a decent grade in my last school exam. It was my last hurrah; from then on, I stopped reading Hindi, other than signage and the occasional newspaper.

Over the years, I have learned a semester of German (the grundstufe eins), a smattering of Spanish (how could you not, living in the US?) and acquired some proficiency in the language of my ‘home state’, Punjabi.  I dream of attaining fluency in all three and will describe my struggles with them in future posts.

In the meantime, I continue to speak Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani with a certain colloquial fluency (I can certainly curse in it with some elan). But my primary language for communication remains English; it’s what I speak, it’s what teach, read, and write in.  I enjoy switching back and forth between the two, but I know where my home is.

More on these languages, and my relationships with them, soon.