Why Learning In Your Mother Tongue Is Important

International Mother Language Day

- ANINDITA ACHARYA

Scene 1: A mother and her 12-year-old daughter step into a bookstore at the recently concluded 48th Kolkata International Book Fair. As she glances at the shelves, she says in Bengali, "Let's leave. There are no English books here."

Scene 2: A father is taken aback when he hears that his friend has enrolled his son in a Bengali-medium school. "Without learning English, there's no future," he remarks.

In today's world, where technology dominates our lives, are we moving away from our mother tongue? Does working and communicating in one's native language make a person seem less educated than someone fluent in English? And is it really something to be proud of if one struggles with their mother tongue or claims not to know it well?

Language shapes our sense of home and belonging. Speaking in one's mother tongue feels like home. Yet, many urban Indian families are losing that connection as children grow up without fluency in their native language. But history tells a different story-India's greatest literary minds, from Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali) and Munshi Premchand (Hindi) to Subramania Bharati (Tamil), Gopinath Mohanty (Odia), and KP Kesava Menon (Malayalam), wrote in their mother tongue.