A journey from one language to many - with no destination! (Part 2)

To continue from the last part, children learn the most from their parents - good or bad, all things. And when it comes from learning a language, it is mostly from the mother. No wonder why this first-learnt language is called the "Mother Tongue". So, for a kid, it is important to listen, grasp and follow the way the mother speaks. For the mother, it is important to speak softly, calmly, clearly and informatively to her kid. As a primary caregiver, the mother has a role to play to shape the quality of language the child can eventually embrace. Of course, the father too has a role to play. 

At home the child learns the most. After home, the other place is of course the school. A good environment is essential there. Today, we are reducing our vocabulary set. We are somewhat diminishing the vernacular local languages at the cost of English. This is not correct - both should exist. When language shrinks at home the tendency will spread to schools and to societies. Words and expressions in the mother tongue will not flow smoothly and will not touch each other. The classmates can definitely speak in English during their lectures, but outside school hours, a certain time-span can be kept aside to converse in the common language. We should not forget the roots.

How did I learn Bangla? Yes, just by listening to my mother. She was a lifelong dreamer and thinker and she did all that dreaming and thinking in Bengali. The fact that she was very transparent in her life allowed her to express her thoughts and dreams also in Bengali. I would just hear her and formulate on my own. Long before grammar and sentence construction came to me, I had learnt the nuances of speaking in Bengali.

Then came books and literature. Mom would read and I would see her reading. When child sees parents do something, the child gets attracted to the action. Seeing the act happen has much wider impact than being told to do that same act! I would read and read for hours those children books - all from ghost stories to adventures to funny comics to deep facts. When you read, you find patterns. The patterns help constructing ideas. The ideas help shape personality.

Let me then note down the points I would recommend to reflect upon when learning mother tongue.

• Create an atmosphere of open and healthy conversation at home, it would be better that the mother leads this. The conversation must be in the mother tongue (Modersmål in Swedish, Muttersprache in German). It should be simple, easy for ears and impactful to the kid.

• The child should be allowed to feel comfortable to listen to the conversation, and especially should be able to follow what the mother says. Often the father has the same role to play. All in all, a good environment where the child can listen to facts, stories, talks and orders in easy language style is essential.

• After this comes books. Please parents - develop the culture of book reading at home. Generations will pass by, we will all become irrelevant, credits and discredits will become history, what will remain are the books. Give the child enough books, read with the child, make a habit of a story a day when getting the child to sleep. See the wonders in the child when he or she reaches the age of 6 or 7. Start early, start at 3 or 4 and continue for a few years - parents, you will be surprised to see the effect.

• Again to the parents - make a circle of friends in which mother tongue is spoken. Not just for communication, but for practicing brainstorming, sharing humour or spreading ideas. This sort of environmental culture helps the child and the friends of the child. It is an osmosis process, no one knows who benefits from whom, but the benefit becomes visible within a few years. Often the children talking in the same vernacular language end up becoming lifelong friends - research knows why!

• When the child starts growing up, the child should start reading more. With maturity comes responsibility. What the boy or girl at the age of 13-14 reads or says must be sober, correct and pleasing for the ears. Knowing the script, the syntax, the semantics and the grammar are necessary for boyhood/girlhood period. Here is the deal - a good looking boy or girl behaves and acts smart, but the moment he or she starts to speak in a chaste mother tongue, he or she owns that smartness and glows in intellectual confidence. And anyone with that quality gets unbelievably strong in personality.

• Final tip - go back to literature, again and again. Read prose, understand dialogues in the mother tongue, grasp a character through the dialogues, navigate complexity of life through stories. Stories reflect society and its realities. Read poems to understand softness. Everything is not medicinal, all problems cannot get solved by chewing a gum or swallowing a pill. There is a thing called therapy - poetry, in one's own native language, is a healing therapy to overcome loses, setbacks, pitfalls. Learn humour in own language. Learn anger too in own language. No matter how many more languages we would end up learning in life, when it comes to laughter and breaking out wild in laughs, we will be the most comfortable on our own language. Same when we are tilted to the most difficult phase and we get angry. Mother tongue gives some nuances to express - let us use those!

[To be continued...]