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Language Families in India
via Wikipedia |
The reason I write today is
this article by Saritha Rai on the NY Times' India blog, which my sister linked to. It laments the fact that the next generation in urban India is cut off linguistically from the country/ region/ their homeland because they speak - and think - in English. For me personally, this article has come about twenty years too late, because I have no hesitation in saying that English has always been my first language - perhaps not my mother tongue, or native tongue, but always my operational tongue (if you will).
I think it's a great article - but I also think it is an article that only scratches the surface of a deeper, wider phenomenon that "English as a First Language" is merely a side-effect of... what follows in this post is a predictably lengthy meditation on this phenomenon, as opposed to the symptom.
