Tulu, my poor mother tongue, is dying. Now before anyone with any insight into this matter raises their cudgels, I want to qualify my statement. Tulu, as spoken by South Kanara Brahmins, is dying.
Tulu does not have a script of it's own, not one that is in current usage in any case. So it was at a disadvantage right from the beginning. There are many dialects of Tulu, and the more widely spoken one is the Bunt dialect. Incidentally, this brand of Tulu is flourishing (relatively speaking, of course). It's spoken by many more people, and all the Tulu mass media (films and songs) that I have come across (I have seen exactly 1 Tulu film and 1 Tulu song) are in this dialect. The my-kind-of-Tulu-speaking folks are a minority among minorities. So while the Bunt Tulu might be okay for a while, I am concerned about the "Brahmin" Tulu. While I am embarassed to be even making this Bunt/Brahmin distinction (too many negative connotations related to the caste system), that is the easiest way to distinguish between the two dialects. For the rest of this blog, when I say Tulu, I mean the one spoken by South Kanara Brahmins.
As long as the South Kanara Brahmins were in South Kanara, Tulu was used widely. Tulu-speakers living outside South Kanara found that other languages competed for dominance - Kannada in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, other regional languages in other states, Hindi and English. My parents speak Tulu fine, since they were raised by first-generation immigrants/native settlers. I, on the other hand, was raised in Bombay by a second-generation immigrant (my father) and a quasi-first-generation immigrant(my mother traveled quite a bit in her childhood). My Tulu is considerably inferior and less frequently spoken compared to my parents. My daughter, born and being raised in the US, may not speak Tulu as an adult, going by the experience of other families such as us. Given that most of the younger Tulu-speaking population lives outside of South Kanara, the newer generation is going to grow up outside of their native place, and many even outside their country of origin. The language is doomed!
So what can we do? I hardly suggest containing emigration, cross-cultural marriages, or any such ridiculous proposition for the sake of the preservation of my mother tongue. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that we should force our children to speak our mother tongue. I encourage my daughter to speak in Tulu, but with even my Tulu-speaking husband speaking to her mostly in English, I find it's a losing battle. I am no Tulu pandit, but the thought of even my beginner's Tulu ending with me is disconcerting. I am surprised that I feel like this, and am beginning to think it's the evolutionary instinct at play here. Aware of our mortality, we want to transcend death by leaving behind our language, culture and genes with our children. A tenuous hypothesis, but enough to satisfy my puzzlement at my sudden affinity to my mother tongue. For now, I am a passive observer, witnessing and doing little else about the slow death of a language.
Tulu does not have a script of it's own, not one that is in current usage in any case. So it was at a disadvantage right from the beginning. There are many dialects of Tulu, and the more widely spoken one is the Bunt dialect. Incidentally, this brand of Tulu is flourishing (relatively speaking, of course). It's spoken by many more people, and all the Tulu mass media (films and songs) that I have come across (I have seen exactly 1 Tulu film and 1 Tulu song) are in this dialect. The my-kind-of-Tulu-speaking folks are a minority among minorities. So while the Bunt Tulu might be okay for a while, I am concerned about the "Brahmin" Tulu. While I am embarassed to be even making this Bunt/Brahmin distinction (too many negative connotations related to the caste system), that is the easiest way to distinguish between the two dialects. For the rest of this blog, when I say Tulu, I mean the one spoken by South Kanara Brahmins.
As long as the South Kanara Brahmins were in South Kanara, Tulu was used widely. Tulu-speakers living outside South Kanara found that other languages competed for dominance - Kannada in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, other regional languages in other states, Hindi and English. My parents speak Tulu fine, since they were raised by first-generation immigrants/native settlers. I, on the other hand, was raised in Bombay by a second-generation immigrant (my father) and a quasi-first-generation immigrant(my mother traveled quite a bit in her childhood). My Tulu is considerably inferior and less frequently spoken compared to my parents. My daughter, born and being raised in the US, may not speak Tulu as an adult, going by the experience of other families such as us. Given that most of the younger Tulu-speaking population lives outside of South Kanara, the newer generation is going to grow up outside of their native place, and many even outside their country of origin. The language is doomed!
So what can we do? I hardly suggest containing emigration, cross-cultural marriages, or any such ridiculous proposition for the sake of the preservation of my mother tongue. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that we should force our children to speak our mother tongue. I encourage my daughter to speak in Tulu, but with even my Tulu-speaking husband speaking to her mostly in English, I find it's a losing battle. I am no Tulu pandit, but the thought of even my beginner's Tulu ending with me is disconcerting. I am surprised that I feel like this, and am beginning to think it's the evolutionary instinct at play here. Aware of our mortality, we want to transcend death by leaving behind our language, culture and genes with our children. A tenuous hypothesis, but enough to satisfy my puzzlement at my sudden affinity to my mother tongue. For now, I am a passive observer, witnessing and doing little else about the slow death of a language.
