The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan in Color
8 — Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Me and my mother tongue

I don’t speak my mother 
tongue. I used to be regretful, 
upset and honestly a little bit 
ashamed that I never tried very 
hard to learn it. 
My parents first tried to teach 
me when I was a baby. Appar-
ently, I used to flip flop between 
Tamil and English, which con-
fused 
my 
white 
preschool 
teachers. And I guess my teach-
ers were concerned enough that 
they told my parents to only 
teach me English at home. 
I like to think that my teach-
ers had good intentions, but 
deep down, I still hold a lit-
tle bit of resentment towards 
their inflexibility in teaching 

a bilingual child. In a world of 
“what-ifs,” I sometimes imagine 
a universe in which speaking 
solely Tamil from birth would 
have made me feel more secure 
in my Tamil identity. I wish that 
I had learned earlier that my 
American and Tamil identities 
aren’t mutually exclusive. I wish 
that society didn’t pressure my 
parents and other immigrants 
to assimilate and sacrifice their 
culture to survive in America. I 
wish that my teacher didn’t tell 
my parents to only speak to me 
in English.
In late elementary school, 
my parents tried teaching me 
my mother tongue again by 
sending me to a Tamil school 
on Sundays. We would wake 
up at 5:30 in the morning and 
drive an hour and a half to Ann 

Arbor to attend religious and 
language classes. Since I was 
starting with very little prior 
background, I attended a baby 

class with 4- and 5-year-olds. 
There, the classrooms were 
bare, with no furniture and 
empty white walls, but I never 
felt isolated among the sharp 

scolding of our teacher and the 
whispers of students. We sat on 
the floor, crisscrossing our legs, 
studying off of yellowed, torn 

workbooks from India. After a 
few months, I went from learn-
ing how to count to three to 
introducing myself, and before I 
knew it, I was piecing together 
sentences. Eventually, I was 
good enough that when I went 
to Sri Lanka, I could talk to the 
store owner to ask for a bottle 
of soda and converse with my 
cousin who didn’t speak Eng-
lish. 
Over time, we stopped going; 
life got busier, and driving an 
hour and a half for a two-hour 
class just didn’t seem sustain-
able. Slowly, my Tamil skills 
started to fade without practice. 
I mean, I can still kind of under-
stand it — I can use my lim-
ited knowledge to put together 
thoughts with the help of a few 
occasional English words and 
exaggerated 
hand 
gestures. 
However, I am far from fluent. 
As a member of the Tamil 
diaspora that was forced out of 
Sri Lanka, the Tamil language 
is central to our identity. In lan-
guage lies stories, history and 
culture passed through genera-
tions. The survival of the Tamil 
language in Sri Lanka particu-
larly represents the persever-
ance of our community through 
war and state-sanctioned geno-
cide. Considering the struggles 
that my community has over-
come to keep our language and 

culture alive, it almost feels 
more sacrilegious that I don’t 
know how to speak it due to 
its vast history and continued 
efforts at preservation.
As an adult, I reckon with this 
loss. My experience is not dis-
similar to other first-generation 
children, who must also now 
redefine their cultural heritage 
in the absence of their mother 
tongues. 
In college, without my par-
ents, 
I’ve 
interrogated 
my 
relationship with the Tamil 
language. I even signed up for 
a Tamil class during fresh-
man year but quickly dropped 
out when I realized that I was 
much further behind my class-
mates. Despite these experi-
ences, by meeting other Desi 
peers that don’t speak their 
native tongue, I have rediscov-
ered ways to exchange cultures. 
I realized that language is not 
the only way to build commu-
nity. Instead, I have found other 
ways to connect with my Tamil 
ethnic identity — through eat-
ing foods like dosa or appam, 
going to temple and celebrating 
Navratri and Tamil New Year, 
learning the history of our com-
munity and sharing it through 
MiC. And even though I don’t 
speak or even fully understand 
Tamil, its rhythmic cadence 
gives me comfort.
From a young age, I grew up 
listening to my parents speaking 
it to each other, my dad playing 
the BBC Tamil radio every night 
and my Tamil teachers singing 
us bhajans. So, when I hear it on 
the street or at a party, I feel at 
home. 
Ultimately, I really hope to 
relearn 
my 
mother 
tongue, 
but if I don’t, that’s okay. The 
sounds of Tamil will always put 
me at ease, and maybe I’ve come 
to accept that this little com-
fort is enough. In the process of 
mourning my mother tongue, I 
have redefined what being dia-
sporic Tamil means to me.

MAYA KOGULAN
MiC Columnist

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In the process of mourning 
my mother tongue, I have 
redefined what being 
diasporic Tamil means 
to me.

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