Training and Untraining the Tongue: The Unfortunate Story of Receptive Bilingualism
Illustration by Ashley Setiawan
Growing up, my house has always felt like more of a hostel than a home. My Dad, being somewhat over-hospitable, returned the favours to people who helped him emigrate from Punjab to England in the 80s by opening our house to many family friends making the same leap. I remember, even in my younger years, being able to communicate effortlessly with these guests. Punjabi rolled off my tongue like honey, and I could volley conversation like a professional; I knew the inside jokes, I knew the cliches, I had a whole other world in my mouth. But when I began to notice caricatures of Indian people on television, the kids in school who would slap on an Indian accent when they were talking about curry, or the weird looks we’d get speaking Punjabi out in public, I fell out of love with my language. In turn, I fell out of love with myself, my parent’s birthplace, and began to build a bridge that would be my escape route from such a massive part of me. Importantly, I never considered how painful this separation would be.
Naturally, I was likely to speak English more since I spoke it in school and was taught it by my older siblings. They are ten years my senior, and perhaps they went through the same rejection of heritage as I did, as they refrained largely from speaking to me in Punjabi. It became a norm for me to speak English at home, but I still attempted to keep my Punjabi tongue exercised. Eventually, it got tiring to switch back and forth, even though it came to me naturally, and when the internalised racism and self-hatred began to settle in, I continued to repress my Punjabi-ness even more. English has become so integral to my language learning that I couldn’t imagine learning Punjabi without having English to make sense of the translation. How could my mind have trained my brain to understand certain meanings when I never had the English word to form this new foreign word around? These were questions that became aware to me.
Language is like piercing. You love it for a while. You change the jewelry from a plain stud to a hoop. Maybe you’ll make it a cuff. It’s not long, though, until the trend wears off. It doesn’t look good anymore, it doesn’t suit you in the society you’re living in. So, you take it out, and you slowly wait for it to close up. How long will it take? Who knows. From time to time you will consider poking something into it: why not just keep it? You ask someone, and they laugh at you. You want to keep that? Really? You let it close. Until you realise how big a part of you it was. And so, you’re back there, in front of the mirror, forcing a sharp end into the mark that remains of the hole that is no longer there.
The process of unlearning does not always work as well as you think it can, but after many years of manifesting, it’s likely to make a lasting impact. I couldn’t tell you what reignited the pride in my cultural heritage. I think it was realising how badly I had tried to suppress it. Social media made me see so many Punjabi people my age who spoke Punjabi fluently, wore their identity on their sleeves unashamedly, and I realised how I wasn’t one of them. I would see videos of people speaking fluently to their parents, their grandparents, to extended relatives. I began to realise how I haven’t had a proper conversation with my Mum in years, or have never been able to respond properly to my elderly family who try to conversate with me. My little cousin said to our Grandma once, “Maaji, speak to me in English or don’t speak to me.” It hurt to hear that. Our Grandma was doing no harm, we had done the harm to ourselves by not giving our grandparents the chance to even speak to us and know us. I’ve grown up seeing people so close to their parents and grandparents, all because they can talk. The power of language. The power of communication.
I realised how precious this heritage is. When I began to learn about the status of Punjabis in their home country of India and the way they are abused and alienated for their differences to non-Punjabi Indians and non-Sikh residents, I realised that I have a culture to uphold, protect and be proud of. I wanted to assert my ownership over this special part of me, which was being threatened around the world.
Regardless, I was never able to fully let go of Punjabi. At the end of the day, I have been surrounded by it my whole life. There are times that in my head, I seem to be able to scribe the perfect sentence. In translation, though, as it tries to run through my tongue, it gets stuck, and I get lost. I become more ashamed and more embarrassed than I ever did whilst being able to speak it fluently. I have made a conscious effort to try to speak to my mother more in Punjabi. But often, when I stumble, she is too tired to keep educating me. I can’t blame her. I had 20 years to learn, I had 20 years not to let go of something so precious to me. On job applications, I wonder if I should tick the box that I’m bilingual. Is it a lie?
My friend pointed out to me once. “It’s so interesting that when you speak to your Mum, she speaks to you in Punjabi and you respond in English. And you both just understand.” I later found out that the word for this is receptive bilingualism. Is this some sort of milestone? An achievement? What I hope is that it’s a door to access a chance to get better and better. I assess that situation in my head, and try my best to speak more in Punjabi. Then I get to thinking, is my Mum better off with me speaking to her in English so she can pick up the language fluently, since it's the language of the country we live in, the country we try to survive in? What’s more necessary? It’s a difficult choice to make.
Regardless of all of this, I hope that one day I will be able to speak confidently with my parents, not just listen and then speak back to them in English. My home is not much of a hostel anymore, but my family and I will always be from this other land, the motherland, and being able to speak to our friends and family in our language is like a free ticket to being back home whenever we want. Hopefully, I’ll be given the chance to teach my language to my children, my siblings’ children, and further. What is most important is that the language of our heritage— and that something my parents taught me— can continue to live on.