Sign Language

My dad studied in a Kannada medium school. In other words, the medium of instruction was Kannada and all his textbooks were in Kannada. He had to learn English and Hindi real well and real fast when he joined the army (and that's a story in itself). Mum studied English all along and due to her going to grad school for Sanskrit, English was always something she was good at.

I started talking when I was four - which is phenomenally late by any standard. I'm told I had my baby talk vocabulary for everything I wanted at the age and so couldn't be arsed about learning any "real" language. As preschool loomed over the horizon, my parents realized a couple of things

1) I needed to stop communicating like a baboon
2) We lived in a town of goat herds and schooling would do more harm than help there.

I was home-schooled for the first two years of my academic life. Considering Hindi is the lingua franca on any Army base, I was always ahead of the curve when it came to English. Hindi, not so much. I guess there was only so much room in my head for languages.

As a kid I spoke in Kannada only with my grandparents and elder relatives. And since my high school had pretty much banned all non-English languages, my knowledge of Kannada is rather formal. English is the language of choice, it's the tongue I think in, it's what the hot girls in my dreams speak.

I can speak Anglican pretty fluently, without ever using Kannada words (like everyone else, yes). But if I make the mistake of trying Hindi, I use all the non-English words I know and it's a big mess of ethnicity. Until recently, anyway.

The kid and I started communicating in English and she'd always brag that her Kannada was better than mine (NO IT AIN'T, WOMAN). We started talking in Kannada as a joke/challenge before we started seeing each other. By the time we were together, that was the only language we used. As a result, these days I find myself almost using Kannada words in an English sentence. It only happens when I hear a South Indian accent. Still, pretty weird.

I have very little faith in my mental abilities as it is, and I'm even more convinced that all this drinking and brain cell killing is starting to catch up. So if you come back next time and see worse-than-usual crap, you'll know it was a really good weekend.