We Indians, are really lucky - almost all of us are bilinguals. Many of us are tri and multi linguals. Besides the obvious benefit of having access to literatures in all the languages one has knowledge of, I think languages serve a very important purpose. I have experienced it every time I try to put down my thoughts when I see something of great beauty, like the Niagara or the Grand Canyon or a picture of my cute niece - the lack of words to express EVERYTHING I feel, in English.
I guess I am not the only person, but English seems to me, very inadequate when I have to express something from my heart. My preferred choice would be Tamizh, my mother tongue or even Hindi. Somehow, calling someone, who unmindful of you or the traffic light, decides to cross the road and worse still, pauses to grin like a complete idiot, names in English, does not help in expressing all the anger, irritation, the urge to get down and murder the person as well as I would want it to be!! What can I call the Niagara except beautiful? How shallow the word sounds in front of the majesty of the falls!!
Switching between different languages is a very big convenience in such situations. So when I am upset, I use English, especially when I want to soften the blow. When I am really angry (usually due to road-rage), I switch to Tamizh. Hindi is a rarely used language, and as a result is pretty rusty. Besides, I don’t know cuss words that are moderate enough for me in Hindi. English has a lot of them and most of them are meant for the person’s mother than the person himself, so I rarely use those !!Calling names in my case is using the names of different animals in my case. It is a different thing altogether that in many instances, these animals behave better than people in general and me in particular. In Indian languages, since we tend to sing, rather than talk, changing the tune a little also changes the tone (wow, that sounds like poetry !!). Stress the ‘r’s a little and most words can be converted to cuss words, without really meaning anything harmful.
I am not including the newly evolved languages like Hinglish (’The other day, my papa was telling me ki I should not ghumafy in the scooter’) or Tanglish (what most of our RJ’s speak). Those to me combine the worst of all languages and are absolutely useless in conveying emotions.
What is the best language when you want to ‘pet’ babies? (See I could not find anything better than ‘pet’) That is the language I love most, since there is no limit to your imagination in that language. Although there is no grammar, I think this language too is a derivative of the mother tongue of the petter (is there such a word?) or the petted. As a result ‘chunnu’, ‘munnu’ make sense for kids speaking Hindi and related languages and ‘kutti’, ‘pattu’ along with a combination of different fabrics etc for Tamizh kids. I heard my Kannada speaking friend calling the baby ‘bangara’ (meaning gold) and am guessing that telugu speakers would use a minor variant of the term. What kind of baby-talk can I try with English speaking kids?
What languages do you prefer for your different moods?
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