A mother tongue is the first homeland a child ever knows

Nelson Mandela, asked once why he had spent his prison years learning Afrikaans from his guards, replied: ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ The 2011 Census of India records 1,369 mother tongues, grouped administratively into 121 languages, of which 22 are scheduled. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists 197 Indian languages as vulnerable, endangered or moribund — the highest count for any country in the world. A mother tongue is not a communication tool; it is the first homeland a child ever knows, the cognitive geography on which every subsequent map is drawn. To lose it is not inconvenience — it is exile from one’s own thought, and the loss is silent because the speaker often does not feel the perimeter shrinking until the children no longer dream in the language.

The cognitive and pedagogic case is by now unambiguous. UNESCO’s 1953 monograph The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education opened the empirical argument; seventy years of replication across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia have confirmed it. Children educated in their mother tongue till the foundational stage acquire literacy faster, retain it longer, and transfer that literacy more successfully to a second language than children plunged into a colonial-administrative medium at age five. The National Education Policy 2020 codified this finding through a three-language formula and the recommendation that the mother tongue, the local language, or the regional language be the medium of instruction at least until Class 5 and preferably Class 8. The PISA 2018 cross-country analysis showed that early mother-tongue learners outperformed peers educated in second languages on every measured indicator. The NIPUN Bharat foundational literacy mission of 2021 explicitly rests on this evidence.

The cultural-sovereignty case runs deeper still. Rabindranath Tagore composed Gitanjali first in Bangla; he won the Nobel Prize for the English self-translation but always insisted the original was the work. Premchand wrote in Hindustani that mediated between Urdu and Hindi; his novels remain unmatched in their idiomatic dignity. U R Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1965) made Kannada a literary instrument for caste critique; Namdeo Dhasal’s Dalit Panther poetry of the 1970s gave Marathi a new vocabulary of dissent; Mahasweta Devi’s Bangla short fiction documented Adivasi resistance; Perumal Murugan’s Tamil Madhorubhagan (2010) opened a still-unfinished argument. Sangam-era Tamil produced one of the great classical literatures of the world, predating any European vernacular by a millennium. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 scheduled languages, with proposals for further additions pending. The conferral of Classical Language status — Tamil (2004), Sanskrit (2005), Telugu and Kannada (2008), Malayalam (2013), Odia (2014), and most recently Marathi, Bengali, Pali, Prakrit and Assamese in October 2024 — is not honorific. It triggers research-chair funding, manuscript-digitisation grants and institutional recognition. Each language saved is a way of seeing the world preserved.

The digital age has raised the stakes. Artificial intelligence trained predominantly on English-language text risks becoming a new colonialism, one that decides which knowledge is search-indexable and which is invisible, which questions are even askable. India’s response has been BHASHINI — the Bhasha Interface for India — a national language-translation stack released in beta from 2022 that handles real-time speech and text across the Eighth Schedule languages. Sansad Bhashini, deployed in Parliament from July 2023, translates floor speeches live across the major scheduled languages; a Member from Mizoram can speak Mizo and a Member from Kerala hears Malayalam in his earpiece within seconds. SWAYAM MOOCs are now available in twelve Indian languages. The Common University Entrance Test in 2025 offered question papers in thirteen languages. A digital republic must be multilingual by design, not as an afterthought added in the second release.

The shadow of this virtue must be acknowledged honestly. Mother-tongue pride can curdle into linguistic chauvinism. The anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu in 1937, 1965 and again periodically have shaped a generation’s relationship with the national imagination, and the violence of January 1965 left several dead. Bengaluru’s recurring signboard disputes, Mumbai’s episodic taxi-language politics during the Shiv Sena era, and the periodic battles over imposition or non-imposition of any one language across the Hindi heartland reveal the fragility of multilingual coexistence. India’s federal stability requires bilingualism if not trilingualism, not monolingualism in any direction; English remains an indispensable link-language of opportunity, of scientific publication and of inter-state mobility for the white-collar workforce. Sub-nationalism that demands one language at the expense of another forgets that a multilingual citizen is constitutionally and cognitively richer.

The economic case is also unambiguous. The World Bank’s 2022 study on multilingual education in developing countries finds that mother-tongue-medium primary education produces higher lifetime earnings even for children who later switch to English-medium higher education. The reason is structural: cognitive scaffolding built in the language of the home transfers laterally to subsequent languages, while children who are denied that scaffolding never fully recover the lost foundation. India’s urban middle-class anxiety to push English from kindergarten is, by this evidence, counter-productive even on its own terms. The right policy sequence is mother tongue first for depth, regional language and English added for breadth, and an extra classical or foreign language for ambition.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, wrote Decolonising the Mind (1986) to argue that to write in the coloniser’s language is to inherit its categories and its silences. India’s 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of mother tongues are not a problem to be solved but a heritage to be tended. The mature policy is additive, not subtractive — mother tongue first, regional language next, English alongside, Sanskrit or another classical language for those who choose, and freedom to add more. Fund manuscript libraries. Subsidise translation between Indian languages, not only from Indian languages to English. Pay teachers in tribal-language medium schools premiums for the cognitive load they carry. A nation that defends every mother tongue defends the imaginative range of its citizens, and ultimately the range of its institutional thought. The first homeland precedes the official one; both must be honoured at once, and the older one must not be allowed to die first because its citizens were taught to be ashamed of it.