To Express Your Heart all you need is a language!

‘We must teach science in the mother tongue. So that it becomes a highbrow activity. Failing to do so, will make it an activity in which all people cannot participate’, was once said by the Indian scientist C. V. Raman

We all think.  And while we think, we think that we think in some language.

In this country, where all are made to learn and converse in a language alien to its citizens, i.e. English. Conversing in English is equal to a situation where in one converses with himself, i.e. between you and your brain, in a language alien to both of you? Say, Marathi if you are a Keralite?  Sounds complex, Right?

But this may not happen, if you have a good chat with your brain in the language understandable to both of you; which being one’s Mother tongue!  

Mother Tongue basically means a language which prevails in the household. The lullabies, the coaxing words to make your infant self eat and for other stuffs; it is also seen as a language that one stays around, most of the time and can practically speak as a reflex, without even thinking for a while!

Also an interesting point to be noted here is that, one’s mother tongue is the very first language one hears post birth. So we can grasp thing easily, unlike putting effortless attempts to grasp the teachings in a physics lecture, we end up learning the language like a pro.

An archetypal example can be as simple as being in this world of ‘English medium’ can ‘chutni’ be substituted with ‘paste’? Definitely not!

To understand things easily, we often try to speak it out in our own mother tongues as this is the language which forms the foundation of the thinking process.

Culture and heritage are considered as important aspects of one’s life, which in turn is connected through one’s mother tongue. Culture is important as it nurtures and develops a human. But for that, one requires a specific lingual base. In a country like India, we are diversified with a large number of languages and all these languages have their own number of dialects. Each language has its own history and geographical concentration, based on poems, films, songs, plays etc. If I am a Bengali, I will have fish as my staple food, not because I may like it but because it is my culture; while if I am a maharashtrian, loving or hating bhakri can be a choice but eating is a compulsion as it is a part of the maharashtrian culture.

The age old norms say that education begins at home, before school. The mother tongue is the language in which it starts. This gets transferred to other languages easily as we start to learn. And thus mother tongue is a must in one’s life. Nelson Mandela had once said, “If you talk to man in a language he understands, it goes into his head. But if you talk to him in his language, it goes to his heart”.

Nonetheless, never restrict yourself to learning just one language like a pro because, “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world” as said by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Written By Pratiti Dey