India has about 22 official languages and most Indians speak on an average of two languages: their regional language and Hindi. It is a country where people speak in different languages every 5km. Me, living in a metropolitan city, I am surrounded by people who come from different parts of the country. And thus I can speak my mother tongue "Marathi", the language in which I studied at school "English", the language commonly spoken all over India and one of the official languages of India "Hindi" and then I was introduced to "French" during my school days, which I also happen to graduate in and the language I took up as my career opportunity as a French Language Professor.
Being a French language professor I need to keep myself updated with the happenings in France, Francophone countries and the French language. Therefore, I have to listen to different accents, listen to the radio, watch videos, read articles, newspapers, novels and speak in French as much as possible so as to be able to teach it too.
Not trying to boast myself here, I have become quite fluent in French and I am proud of it. It is a foreign language that I have been learning for the past 10 years. But to "learn one language one has to unlearn the other". It occurs quite often that you tend to forget one language because the other language starts overpowering your brain. And which I believe has happened in my case too. I feel very unfortunate and dreadful to say that I can read, write and speak fluently in French than Marathi or Hindi, the languages that I should know as an Indian.
And now it has created a dilemma in me whether I should be proud that I can speak, read and write in French unlike most Indians or should I feel inglorious that I can't read, write and speak in my mother tongue as an Indian. On one hand French is giving me a job, my living. Thanks to French I get to learn a new culture. It has widened my perspectives, my boundaries, my experiences. Whereas, on the other hand I am forgetting my roots, my culture.
Is it justifiable?
As for now, I feel language is just a medium of communication let us try to spread love and happiness in all the languages possible.
