In many Indian homes today, a child says “good night” but not “shubh ratri”, “vanakkam” or “kem cho”. Parents feel proud, schools feel satisfied, and society quietly calls it progress. I understand the aspiration behind it. English opens doors. But somewhere between opportunity and imitation, I believe we have started amputating something intimate. A language is not merely a tool for success. It is also a nervous system for belonging.
The New Indian Dream Speaks in English
I see this increasingly in urban India. A toddler is praised for speaking fluent English before they can speak to their grandparents in their own regional language. At birthday parties, playdates, parent groups and schools, English is not just a medium anymore. It is becoming a marker of class, aspiration and even worth.
Let us be honest about the psychology of this. Parents are not doing this because they hate their roots. Most are trying to protect their children from struggle. They want access, confidence, employability and a smoother social ride. In a highly competitive society, English appears to promise all four.
But there is a difference between learning English and replacing oneself with it.
That is where my discomfort begins.
Language Is Not Just Vocabulary. It Is Identity Storage
A language carries far more than grammar. It carries humour, shame, respect, memory, rhythm, prayer, irritation, tenderness and ancestral worldview. The mother tongue is often the first emotional architecture of a child’s inner world.
In psychology, we speak of identity formation, which is the process by which a child develops a coherent sense of self. That self is not built in abstraction. It is built through repeated relational experiences. The words a child hears at home shape how love sounds, how correction sounds, how grief sounds and how safety sounds.
I once met a child from a highly educated urban family who spoke polished English but could barely understand his grandmother. The grandmother smiled, but there was pain in it. They could occupy the same sofa, but not the same emotional world. That is not a small cultural inconvenience. That is an attachment rupture in slow motion.
Attachment means the emotional bond that helps a child feel safe, seen and connected. Language often becomes one of its invisible bridges.
What Neuroscience Suggests About Native Language and the Brain
The brain does not store language as a cold academic skill. It links language with emotion, memory and sensory association. When a child learns language in emotionally rich contexts, the brain builds stronger neural pathways around meaning and emotional salience.
Emotional salience simply means that the brain marks something as important because it is tied to feeling.
This matters because many children learn English in performative environments. They are corrected, assessed and rewarded through it. Their mother tongue, meanwhile, gets reduced to the language of domestic help, older relatives or scolding. So one language becomes associated with prestige, and the other with embarrassment.
That pairing can shape the brain’s emotional hierarchy.
Over time, the child may not merely prefer English. The child may internalise that one part of the self is more acceptable than another. This is where language loss stops being linguistic and starts becoming psychological.
The Quiet Shame Sitting Under the Surface
Many Indians will not admit this easily, but language in our country is tangled with status anxiety. English often functions as social perfume. It makes one appear polished, upwardly mobile and globally relevant. Regional languages, in some circles, are treated as if they belong to a less sophisticated life.
What a tragic misunderstanding.
A child who cannot speak their mother tongue fluently may grow up globally functional yet locally uprooted. And a child who learns to feel ashamed of their native language often learns, silently, to feel ashamed of their origins too.
This is not melodrama. It is what psychologists call internalised inferiority, where a person unconsciously absorbs the message that something core to them is lesser. The danger is not only cultural loss. It is self-alienation.
We should ask a slightly uncomfortable question here. When we say we want our children to “speak good English”, are we really talking about communication, or are we confessing our class fears?
The Home Should Not Become a Branch of the Market
School may choose English. Fine. The economy may reward English. Also fine. But must the home surrender too?
I resist this idea that every corner of a child’s life must now be optimised for productivity. The home is not a corporate training centre. It is where a child should inherit emotional nuance, family mythology and cultural texture.
I have seen families where parents speak to each other in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi or Gujarati, but switch to English when addressing the child, almost as if the child is an expatriate intern. It would be funny if it were not so revealing.
What are we afraid of? That the child will become less intelligent if they know two languages well? Research and lived experience suggest the opposite. Bilingual children often develop stronger cognitive flexibility, which means the brain becomes better at shifting attention, adapting to context and managing multiple mental frameworks.
In simpler terms, the brain becomes more agile, not less.
A Child Can Learn English Without Losing Their Roots
This is not an argument against English. I speak English. I write in English. I benefit from English. I am not advocating linguistic purism or nostalgic nationalism dressed as wisdom.
I am arguing for psychological wholeness.
A child can be fluent in English and still remain intimate with their mother tongue. In fact, that combination can create a richer mind and a steadier identity. The real issue is not bilingualism. The issue is replacement. When English becomes the only language of intelligence, affection and aspiration, something vital begins to wither.
A mother tongue gives a child access to older generations, regional literature, humour that does not translate, and forms of emotional expression that English often cannot hold in the same way. Some emotions are simply fuller in the language in which a civilisation has breathed for centuries.
What I Believe Parents Need to Protect
If I were speaking directly to parents, I would say this gently but firmly. Do not confuse upward mobility with inner development.
Teach your child English well. By all means, do. But also let them hear the language in which their grandparents bless, tease, worry and pray. Let them know the words that belong to their soil. Let them inhabit more than one world without feeling that one must be sacrificed for the other.
Children do not only inherit our ambitions. They also inherit our anxieties. If we behave as though English is dignity and the mother tongue is decorative, they will absorb that hierarchy long before they can critique it.
And then one day, perhaps in a room full of success, they may still feel oddly homeless.
The Real Question Is Not About Language. It Is About What Kind of Indian We Are Raising
I find this issue deeply human. A child who loses touch with their language may still achieve greatly. But achievement is not the same as rootedness. Fluency is not the same as belonging. And modernity is not the same as maturity.
India does not need children who are merely globally marketable. India needs children who can stand in the world without becoming strangers to their own inheritance.
That is why I do not find this trend entirely right.
Because every time a child loses the language of home, something more than vocabulary is slipping away. A cadence. A memory map. A cultural nervous system. A way of being held by history.
And once a society starts calling that loss sophistication, it may need to pause and ask itself whether it is becoming educated, or merely well-packaged.
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