Opinion Mother tongue: Who is the govt talking to?

The presumption in all this is that the child comes from a unilingual home.

September 25, 2013 01:06 AM IST First published on: Sep 25, 2013 at 01:06 AM IST

Reams have been written on the importance of education in the mother tongue,on how easily children grasp things taught to them in a language they have grown up with and the crucial role it plays as a medium of instruction to keep kids in school. It is also a time-tested means to resuscitate dying local languages.

The presumption in all this is that the child comes from a unilingual home. An essentially urban phenomenon like playschools and creches in a milieu where multilinguality is the norm begs a wider outlook.

Schools abroad that insist on mother tongue education usually give a choice of medium. It might just get unwieldy to practise that in a country whose Constitution recognises more than 20 languages. What would be the local language of,say Tripura,where both Bengali and Kokborok (tribal language) are recognised.

Thanks to the increasingly cosmopolitan character of India’s cities,an average child in urban India is exposed to a melange of languages — the one used to buy groceries,the accented vernacular of Doraemon cartoons,different languages of two sets of grandparents and of course the omnipresent English.

Who then does the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Policy passed last week,that lays down that mother tongue/local language needs to be the primary language of interaction in playschools and creches,seek to address?

Surely these are not children who need to be kept in school by government endeavour. The only kinds of creches that may run the risk of children dropping out are the ones run by the government in rural areas for working women and these almost always do not come with a language choice. The local dialect is the default option.

On the other hand,in a social structure where languages freely melt into each other,why does the government feel the need to mandate a language of instruction for children whose time away from home is essentially more play and less school. The language the child has grown up with is often a happy mix of two or more and any of them that both the child and the teacher can communicate in should be good enough. As should be the mix.

Keeping the mother tongue alive is as much the domain of family as of the school. Governments assuming that role may run the risk of overreach.

Abantika is an assistant editor based in Delhi

abantika.ghosh@expressindia.com