On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 8:04 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrot e:
> Tamil (my mother tongue, which I speak fluently but cannot read or write) Yes, in India, with rapid urbanization, I have seen this amazing phenomenon (which I never thought about for a long time) of people who cannot read and/or write their mother tongue, or even, sometimes, speak it. Are there parallels in other countries? My mother asked me to learn Bengali as my "third language" (the first being English and the second being Hindi) in school, and taught me to read and write Tamil. I am reasonably OK, though given a choice of reading a Tamil book or an English one, I will choose the latter. I still correspond with some of my relatives in Tamil. But I didn't feel the need to teach my daughter to read and write the language...her "third language" in school was Kannada. (I learnt to read and write it along with her; she's forgotten it, but I, being in touch here in Bangalore, have not. But my spoken Kannada remains basic, thanks to being made fun of by Kannada nazis.) I've seen this, of course, in the US, where immigrants adopt English and lose their "mother" tongue...but there, it is a matter of adopting the language of a new country.
