The Language Riddle

My first words to the baby automatically were in Tamil, and Annaiya's reaction was immediate. 'If you speak to him in your mother tongue, how will he learn Kannada?' I suggested that we each speak in our respective languages, and that he would learn both. Ramu was using more English than Kannada even before, and even though he was called to do his part to inject Kannada into Adit, he did not desist from this practice. I reminded Annaiya that in our own childhood too, we had all unconsciously and apparently effortlessly picked up both our own mother tongue and the regional tongue, and then added English to them. He was not convinced. The baby would be confused, he felt. By chance, my cousin Mani, a neurologist of repute, was in town, and on checking with him, he said that a child was known to manage six languages at the same time, and no one knew about the seventh, as none had tried! Adit, in fact, was soon understanding and talking four languages, since the household help and friends and others around spoke Hindusthani, and we used English a lot.
What was interesting was that Adit never mixed up the languages or spoke a language inappropriate to any person. If I asked him in Tamil to convey something to his grandfather, he smoothly did so in Kannada! And so on. Once Gopala, who had come from the States on a visit, tried his level best to make him talk to himself in Tamil [Gopala's Tamil was passable, certainly miles better than Ramu's!] after a long while, however, he had to give up as Adit, probably making out that G was of the same blood as Annaiya and Ramu, replied to him only in Kannada or English!
When one sees the present trend in urban middle classes of talking to their young ones only in English and of preschools also insisting on their charges using that language alone, and even demanding that the parents speak to the children only in it, one feels very dejected that this wonderful facility that a child has is being snuffed out. It puzzles me why they do not see that the more languages a person knows, even if not all of them equally well, the better the communication links, he/she can have and fit more easily into different circumstances. Recently, I chanced to see a National Geographic documentary that substantiated this view, showing how the brain's links [a purely lay description this!] becomes more sophisticated when a young child picks up more languages.