My children don’t speak my mother tongue – as a second-generation migrant, it fills me with sadness
As a second-generation British Pakistani growing up in Bradford, I was surrounded by Urdu and smatterings of Punjabi. English came later, and I can remember not being able to understand my teacher on the first day of nursery. This was all part of my parents’ plan: to speak in Urdu to my siblings and I because they knew we would learn English at school. They were right.
There have been countless debates over the years about which language immigrant parents should speak to their children, and the impact of that on their studies. I’ve never been convinced of the benefit of dropping one language in favour of the other. Because of my parents’ decision, I’m able to speak both languages fluently. I write for a living and worked as a journalist for the BBC, and my multilingualism has only enhanced my life. It gives me access to other worlds, stories, film and poetry. Whether it’s ordering cuts of meat in the butcher, placing an order in a restaurant or discussing designs in a clothing shop, it adds joy to my life, allows me to weave in and out of communities, and frees me from the constraints of any one group.
And yet, despite my love for my mother tongue, my children don’t yet speak Urdu. It wasn’t intentional – 13 years ago, when I got married and moved to London, it just took a back seat. My husband, like me, was born in England, and although we came from similar households, he wasn’t as fluent as I was in our shared mother tongue. Today marks International Mother Language Day, a day to celebrate something that for me has become bittersweet: Urdu has brought me so much, but I worry that it is closed off to my children.
The nine-year-old recently announced that he’d like to learn, so that he can converse with his Nani and Nana Abu (my parents). They live 200 miles away in Yorkshire, and on a phone screen is where he sees them most. While they do speak English, age-related hearing loss means it’s tricky for them to maintain the patience it takes to have a meaningful conversation with my high-energy sons in a language that they learned as adults.
Every conversation is the same: “Salaam. How are you, beta?”
“Salaam, I’m good.”
Then they look at each longingly through the screen of my phone, nodding and smiling, desperate to connect to their grandchildren somehow. Until finally, my mum says: “I love you, baita.” My son nods.
In these moments I mourn the loss of my mother tongue for my children. I wonder how they will connect with their heritage, and what it will mean to them as adults. They have the features and skin tone of Pakistanis but their sensibilities, their tongue and their body language are of English children. They may never understand Urdu poetry – the words of Faiz, Ghalib and Mir are lost to them, at least in their original texts. They don’t have a secret language to use with each other the way my siblings and I do, and they’ll have to watch Indian cinema with subtitles. “Do you understand that?” my son asks, as he catches me on my phone watching a trailer for a new Bollywood epic. He stares at me in wonder, as if I have magical powers.
My husband and I have taken to speaking in Urdu to hide our conversations from the boys, using “chota vala, beech vala and bara vala’” – which roughly translate as “little one, the middle one and the older one” – instead of their names. They think it’s hilarious and have cottoned on to which one is which, the middle one having christened himself as the “beach bum vala”, which feels apt.
They may still pick it up yet. Even if they don’t, my sister reminds us that our nani used to say that despite being of Kashmiri heritage, none of us spoke the language, and that this was a natural part of the passing of time. I teach my sons the things I can. I fill them with a love of their heritage, a respect for the future and a hope they will find a way to learn the things they will need to sustain them in their lives.
Urdu will always be the sound of my childhood. It is songs playing on Sunrise Radio on a summer’s day. It’s gossip at weddings, stories over dinner, theological tales on Eid. On hearing of the passing of a cousin last year, I took myself off for a long walk and ended up in a curry house. Sitting on the brown leather seats, waiting for my order, hearing the waiters speak the language of my parents soothed me. I wanted to curl up on the sofa the way I used to at family dinner parties, falling asleep and being carried to my room, the sound of laughter still ringing in my ears.
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