The quadrilingual life

Growing up in India, I was immersed in four very different languages and cultures. We lived in New Delhi where the majority of people spoke Hindi, India’s de-facto “national” language in the northern states, on a daily basis. I spoke Hindi pretty much exclusively with my friends and at home. But I attended an English-medium school, where all the coursework was taught in British English and we were expected to communicate with our peers and teachers in English all the time at school. I never realized it at the time, but it was a strange dissonance going from talking in English in the last class of the day to seamlessly transitioning into Hindi as we were getting on the school bus to go back home.

It gets crazier than just Hindi and English. My mother’s side of the family was from a state called Andhra Pradesh where the regional language was Telugu. Whenever we visited our relatives in this state, I would constantly be exposed to everyone around me talking in Telugu. This is a very different language than Hindi. It’s an entirely different script (Dravidian, as opposed to Sanskrit) and is one of the four major Southern languages of India. It’s got a massive speaking population and is the fifteenth most popularly spoken language in the world. It even has an entire film industry called Tollywood, the second largest film industry in India after Bollywood.

The strangeness comes in that I was only ever able to immerse myself in this language whenever we visited our relatives in that state. The rest of the time, I was speaking Hindi and English. So I never quite got to develop my speaking, reading, and writing skills in Telugu. In fact, I never even learned how to read the script. But I can effortlessly understand and translate an entire conversation that’s happening in Telugu, even today. I can watch and appreciate Telugu movies and TV shows with ease, but cannot for the life of me read the title of the film if it’s written out in Telugu. So I have a weirdly proficient level of fluency with the language where I can’t quite read it or write it or even talk in it, but I know exactly what someone else is saying when they speak in it, which allows for basic back and forth communication in a rudimentary conversation.

On my father’s side, my grandparents used to live in Kolkata. So every time we visited them, I’d be exposed to Bengali being spoken everywhere. Contrary to Telugu, Bengali is mutually intelligible with Hindi, where a lot of the words sound more or less similar and you can pick up the meaning of the phrases through context. So I can also understand Bengali quite well, but cannot read or write in it. Again, my family never actually lived in Kolkata, so I never got the chance to immerse myself into the culture where the language was spoken and written on a daily basis.

So that’s four languages: English, Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali. My family had some degree of fluency in all four of these and all of them were spoken at home and family gatherings. At home, my parents would sometimes seamlessly switch between all four of these languages mid-sentence when talking to me and my brother. We barely even noticed the switch because we were so accustomed to hearing all four languages being spoken. This is actually fairly common in all of India. Students who speak English at school and Hindi at home (like I did) have merged the two languages and today speak in somewhat of a “Hinglish” hybrid language. In Hinglish, all the proper nouns tend to be in English but the rest of the sentence fragments like articles, pronouns, and prepositions are still spoken in Hindi. You’ll actually see most actors in Bollywood movies today speak in Hinglish as well. This hybridization is not exclusive to Hindi and English, by the way. “Singlish” is a mixture of English, Mandarin, Tamil, Malay, and a whole bunch of other regional dialects most commonly spoken in Singapore. “Chinglish” is catching on very quickly in specific parts of China where the newer generations are using mixed Cantonese and English to communicate with each other in certain provinces.

On top of English and Hindi in school, we also had to take a “third language” elective, for which I chose French. I didn’t get very far in it and ended up re-taking it in high school in New Jersey after moving to the States, but imagine for a second how confusing it must be for a 12-yr old to be spoken to in four different languages at home and then needing to learn yet another entirely foreign language that they have no chance of immersion in during their academic life. Boy, it was a whirlwind. The school even tried to get us to learn Sanskrit on top of all this but quickly realized that nobody’s parents were enrolling their children in a now defunct and useless ancient script, so they stopped offering it after a semester.

So yeah, it’s been a crazy quadrilingual life growing up. You tend to pick up on a lot of similarities and patterns in the languages this way. For example, there’s a lot more commonalities in Hindi and French than you might think. I actually found it easier to learn French through Hindi than through English. As you may know, everything in French is gendered, and in Hindi, every object is usually referred to with a gendered pronoun, despite the object itself not being gendered. When talking about a table or a bag, it’s not uncommon to say “uski” or “usko”, which literally translate to “it’s” or “it”, but the added “-i” or “-o” at the end of the word refers to its gender (female or male, respectively) that gets assigned to it in that moment. Even the sentence structure in French closely mirrors Hindi in terms of subject-verb agreement and article placement. This is something I suspect a lot of native French-only or Hindi-only speakers would never quite pick up on, and I often find myself wondering how many associations and patterns between languages I’m missing out on simply because I don’t know them.

Many of my American friends who have only known English and only ever spoken in English with their families and relatives are often shocked at discovering that I grew up learning four or five languages. “How do you keep them straight in your head?”, they ask. To be honest, I never consciously thought about it. You just gain a degree of familiarity in how it’s spoken by being immersed in the culture and constantly listening to people around you speak it. If anything, I sense a little envy in them that they aren’t able to communicate their thoughts and feelings in any language other than English. India also has a good bunch of mutually intelligible languages that I can easily understand through context. For example, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi share a lot of base words, so I can usually tell what the content and topics of the conversation happening in one of the languages are, even if I can’t pick apart each word and translate it exactly. Similarly, India’s Southern languages like Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam have a lesser but noticeable degree of mutual intelligibility with Telugu, which does help get a basic understanding of common words and patterns. On the other hand, languages like Odia, Assamese, Konkani, Sindhi, and Kashmiri don’t have a good close match to any language that I’m familiar with, so I usually have no clue what anyone’s saying in these languages.

Knowing all these languages has its benefits, of course. There are words in certain languages that simply don’t exist in others due to cultural differences and a lack of proper transliteration. For example, “…kuch bhi” is a phrase often used in Hindi when you’re implying that someone else is making up false claims on the spot. The tone matters a lot here to convey the meaning properly, usually delivered in a dismissive upspeak. But translated literally, “kuch bhi” means “anything at all”, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in isolation without context. Similarly, in Telugu, when signing off after speaking to someone on the phone, people usually end the conversation with a word like “untaanu’, which when literally translated means “I will live.” That sounds like the strangest way to end a phone call, but this is how the cultural differences have imbued the words with their own meanings entirely.

Overall, I’m pretty grateful for the fact that I can understand so many different languages that come from so many varied cultures. I still watch Bollywood movies to this day and listen to Hindi songs quite often. It’s a big source of my connection to India. In school, I used to be one of the fastest Hindi readers and used to score quite well on the Hindi tests, but after fourteen years of not needing to use the language on a daily basis to read or write, my skills have gotten extremely sloppy. It now takes me a good minute to read a sentence that I could’ve easily read in four seconds as if it were nothing. It’s a little sad that these reading and writing skills will eventually fade away without practice, but Bollywood will keep my speaking and listening skills intact for a good while, at least.

It sometimes blows my mind to think about the fact that if the British had never “united” India under one nation, it would still be a patchwork of disparate kingdoms and states, each of which would speak and live by their own languages and cultures. It was only due to the British “unification” that the states united under English and it was because of the British that a whole bunch of signs, companies, and capitalism were all established in English. The recent renamings of popular Indian cities (Madras to Chennai, Bombay to Mumbai, and Calcutta to Kolkata) have all been a part of a larger anti-anglicanization movement where the country is trying to move away from its British ancestry and into its own identity.

Almost every student today in India is taught English and two or three other languages growing up. And it never strikes them as to how different and unique their experience is until they leave the country and go somewhere else, only to see the lack of diversity in the linguistics and culture of the place and start to miss their homeland. It truly is a beautiful country that has a lot to offer in terms of linguistic variety, and I hope I retain a good amount of the languages that I’ve been able to learn throughout the rest of my life.