A Mother Tongue Hiccup
For someone coming from one language-speaking community and living in one that speaks another, many of u reading this can relate to the plight I am going through. We are most likely to be caught between the home and host languages. In my case, it was Malayalam and Tamil. When I was in Trichy, I was caught between the Malayalam spoken at home, the Tamil spoken outside, and the English spoken at school (Yeah the last part was of no consequence). My mother always tells this with a story of me in playschool. The word for water in Malayalam is 'Vellam'. So whenever I wanted water at home, I would say 'Vellam'. However, the same Vellam in Tamil means Jaggery!!! And my mom said that my Preschool teacher was initially confused, for she would have wondered, why does he need Jaggery but doing the action for drinking? (The actions kids do to clearly convey what they are trying to say.. Yeah that's the one). So my mom had to tell my preschool teacher that whenever I said Ve...