Keep it simple, I'm bi-lingual

Hello Everybody,

I remember when my son was around four or five, his teachers in Gurgaon, Haryana began to focus on the English alphabet and phonics seriously, probably in preparation for the next years of his life where he would be introduced to the world of books.  Although he was equally familiar with English and Hindi in the spoken form because of his parent’s background, I did not intervene in “getting him ahead” for reading before he was taught the method at school since I did not want to interfere with the school’s mode of learning.

In India, educating children from middle class families means, invariably, your child will attend a private school of which you will pay all the fees.  Private education also exposes children to the English language often for the first time although teachers are sensitive these days, particularly for the younger ones who communicate in their mother tongue.  

Since India is a federal union of states comprising of twenty-eight states and seven union territories, the common language is supposed to be Hindi.  

But here lies a can of worms…

You see, India boasts many languages, including the Indo-European and Dravidian languages (which formed the basis of European language), including among many: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Marwadi, Oriya Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.

So, how many people speak to their children in THEIR mother tongue, too?  Hands up – me included! 

As a Bengali, raised in England (not from the Hindi-speaking Northern India where I have been living for almost 8 years), I began a voyage of discovery in the Land of the (soon to be) Bi-lingual Child entering preschool.  I asked, what are some of the differences and problems faced by young children in respect to this?  And how do we give them simple, meaningful explanations?

How does the mother tongue (whichever one it may be) influence those sounds and how do you manage grammatical rule differences in English and Hindi?  Do Indian kids pronounce the sounds differently to a native English speaking child, even though they have been taught using excellent, and modern teaching methods at school and if so, why, and should they be corrected?  After all, the foreign customers of the famous Call Centres in India were constantly complaining about not being able to understand their advisors.  My 25 years of international experience in training with recent customers in India, including VPs and senior managers made me also realise the impact upon presentation communication in even the later years and customer confusion over the same spoken deliveries.

Here are some answers to clearly a number of issues that our smaller kids face.  Firstly, the mother tongue definitely influences the pronunciation of the sounds and words.  If a Bengali from India was teaching English sounds, her pronunciation would be very different from a Northern Indian or South Indian.  Secondly, Hindi is a phonetic language – simply put for your child, it means: as it is written, so it is pronounced.  The English language has silent letters sometimes (eg. Knowledge – where the K is silent).  The stress may also be on the wrong syllable because of the mistake of the teacher which is passed on to the child (eg. Development – which in India is generally pronounced Dev-olop-ment.  Hindi has genders of masculine and feminine as in some of the romance languages (such as French) and the rules are similar, in that the gender of the noun determines the endings of the adjective and verb.

I believe these issues can be corrected and stopped in their tracks from the early years using many methods including online speaking dictionaries as guides for teachers.  Simple, short explanations to the children, and repeated correction of pronunciation could achieve an authentic sound for the bi lingual child in India.