Talk To Me

Raising a multilingual child in India is a necessity more than a choice. Amrita Chatwal tells you how to do it with ease...

While researching for this article, I came across so many questions and doubts about raising a bilingual child in the US or Europe. “Bilingual?” I thought to myself. “They’re concerned about their children learning two languages? They should look at our Indian children, where two languages are the minimum a child knows!” I didn’t nullify their very valid concerns, but I marveled at the ease with which most families in India switch from one language to another and then to yet another.

Consider the case of Abhilasha, a Bengali, married to a Gujarati, who was raised in Mumbai. Three languages there already. Add Hindi and English to that, and you have a total of five languages that their child has grown up listening to. “My mother in law was very worried. She banned Gujarati and Bengali in the house because she was concerned that my one year old, who hadn’t spoken a word yet, would get hopelessly confused,” says Abhilasha. Did her child get confused? “No,” she says, “he picked up Hindi and Marathi first because that was what we most commonly spoke and by the time he was four, he was communicating in three languages, with a smattering of words from the other two.”

Darshan Desai, a trainer and counsellor with ISP (Infant Sidha Program) in Mumbai recommends exposing your infant to at least four languages in the initial years. ISP works with parents to help them raise children who are not only smarter, but more aware as well. “A baby starts babbling around the age of 10 months. This baby talk contains words from all the languages of the world. But it is the languages that fall on the baby’s ear that later are picked up by the baby. The rest of the languages get cut off,” he says. Imagine the potential there!