Multilingual by Default: Growing Up with Many Tongues

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In much of the world, speaking three languages is an accomplishment that people mention on a curriculum vitae. In large parts of India it is the unremarkable condition of ordinary life, acquired without instruction and often without the speaker thinking of it as a skill at all. A child in Mumbai may speak Marathi with neighbours, Konkani or Tulu or Gujarati at home depending on where the family came from, Hindi in the street and in films, and English at school. A child in a Jharkhand village may speak Santali or Ho at home, Sadri in the weekly market, and Hindi from the moment they enter a classroom. None of these people are usually described as language learners. They are simply people who live in a place where different languages do different jobs.

The scale of the underlying diversity is easy to state and hard to grasp. The 2011 census processed well over a million raw returns of mother tongue, rationalised them into around 1,369 recognised mother tongues, and grouped those into 121 languages with at least ten thousand speakers each. Twenty-two of those languages appear in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, which brings certain rights of official use and representation on language commissions. The remaining ninety-nine, plus the very large number of languages with fewer than ten thousand speakers that the census does not list separately, have no such standing. An independent effort, the People's Linguistic Survey of India, conducted between 2010 and 2013 under the linguist Ganesh Devy with several thousand volunteers, documented a substantially larger number of living languages, roughly seven to eight hundred, which suggests the census threshold hides a great deal.

How the languages divide the work

Multilingualism of this kind is not four parallel copies of the same competence. Linguists describe it as functional allocation: each language occupies particular domains, and speakers rarely feel a need for full literacy in all of them. A trader in a border district may speak a neighbouring state's language fluently for business and never read a word of it. A grandmother may command an ancestral language spoken only within the household and use it with nobody outside. The result is that the same person can be a confident speaker in one language, a competent reader in a second, and a passive understander of a third, and this is a stable arrangement rather than a deficiency.

Layered on top is diglossia, which is common in South Asian languages: a formal literary register used in writing, news broadcasting and public speech that differs substantially from the spoken register used at home. Tamil is the standard example, where the written form and everyday spoken form diverge enough that a learner who studies only the literary language will struggle in a conversation, but Bengali, Telugu, Sinhala and Arabic show the same pattern. Children absorb both registers and switch between them by context. Alongside diglossia sits constant code-switching, the movement between languages within a single conversation or even a single sentence. Popular culture has formalised some of these blends into recognised styles, Hinglish being the most commercially visible, used in advertising, film dialogue and radio precisely because it signals urban, young and informal. Code-switching is often described by anxious commentators as a corruption of both languages; sociolinguists generally treat it as rule-governed behaviour, since speakers switch at grammatically permissible points and use the switch to mark topic, intimacy, authority or humour.

Schools, politics and the three-language question

Where multilingualism stops being effortless is in school. Indian language policy in education has revolved for more than half a century around the three-language formula, articulated in the National Policy on Education of 1968 and reaffirmed in successive policies including the National Education Policy of 2020. In broad terms it proposed that children in Hindi-speaking states learn Hindi, English and a modern Indian language preferably from the south, and that children elsewhere learn the regional language, Hindi and English. The formula was never implemented symmetrically. In practice the third language in Hindi-speaking states was frequently Sanskrit rather than a southern language, so the burden fell mostly on non-Hindi states.

The politics of this are real and unresolved. Tamil Nadu has followed a two-language policy of Tamil and English since the late 1960s, a direct consequence of the anti-Hindi agitations, most intensely in 1965, which were driven by fear that Hindi would become the sole official language of the Union and disadvantage southern candidates in public employment. The Official Languages Act of 1963 and its subsequent amendment preserved English as an associate official language indefinitely, which defused the immediate crisis but did not settle the argument. Every renewed proposal to strengthen Hindi teaching reopens it.

A separate and less politicised body of evidence concerns children whose home language is not the state's official language at all: Adivasi children, speakers of languages such as Gondi, Santali, Bhili and Kui, and speakers of regional varieties that are administratively treated as dialects of Hindi. Studies of early schooling repeatedly find that these children face a comprehension barrier in the first years, which shows up as poor foundational literacy and elevated dropout. Multilingual education programmes in states including Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, which begin instruction in the child's own language and transition gradually to the state language and English, have shown encouraging results, and the National Education Policy of 2020 endorses mother tongue instruction at least to Grade 5 where feasible. The constraint is practical rather than ideological: it requires teachers who speak the language, textbooks in a script, and a willingness among parents who often, quite rationally, want their children in English-medium classrooms because that is where economic opportunity visibly sits. That tension between cognitive evidence and parental aspiration is the honest centre of the debate, and it has not been resolved anywhere in the country.

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