Not long back, was I once discussing with a fellow friend about the different accents our friend circle contains – Bihari accent Hindi, Tamil accent English, Gujarati accent Hindi, Ranchi accent Hindi, Odiya accent English, and so on. We were amazed to see, even English which is supposed to be a language of global order also have so many variants. We often keep discussing how people with a higher mother tongue accent in English are usually the ones, most nervous and shy. Probably because they are conscious that they carry the accent. Somehow we all are trying or were trying at a point of time to get away with our mother tongue accent in English/ Hindi and in any foreign language that you are proficient in. But can we really do it?
We do merely change our accents to a Gujarati to a British accent English and we claim that we are better at it. We try and eliminate our Odiya or Bihari touch in Hindi and try to be more like a Delhi’ite would speak. That is not Hindi too. We need to understand this. There is NO original accent to a language. No where in your grammar or recitation classes, would you have been taught “accents”. There were parts of speech, translations, etc. but never a chapter or a lesson called the accents. So, if you also contain an accent to a language – English or Hindi, maybe improving on it is good but having an accent is not bad. There is one very big loss when it comes to trying to eliminate the accent from your language. You tend t disconnect from that language, the expression – both tangible and intangible of that language and start severing nearly everything to remove that accent. Every time you try to remove that accent, you tend to remove a part of your mother tongue from your life. Your language for media changes, your songs list, your movies everything changes. Be cautious. You don’t realise that even when you change from a bihari/odiya/tamilian/telugu/bengali accent to a British accent – it still remains “wrong accent” for the US or the Australians or the Canadians. You will never get it right.
So the better way is be who you are. Let that accent remain. Just make sure you spell, read and write properly. Carrying an accent is natural and you just cannot do away without an accent.
Mother tongue or a local dialect is result of, if not, thousands, hundreds of years of phonetic evolution. Every word that you speak, every phrase, every idiom, every sentence, has the essence of your own culture, the local flavor of life. In a country like India, we are endowed with such a huge diversified language and expressions. Our country has more than 720 dialects – so if we take states and union territories each as a block we have around 20 dialects per block of administrative area. Every dialect has developed with so much precision and experience, it’s not worthy dropping them for any reason whatsoever.
What individuals like us don’t realize is that we are not just a user of the dialect/ language but also the proponents – a link that is endowed with the responsibility of carrying it forward. Something which has been built over many centuries and maybe millennia has to be passed on to the coming generations. So what can we possibly do to preserve and enrich the dialect that we have gained over generations –
First thing first- Do not run away from your accent. You will never be able to and you don’t need to! As your face features, or the tone or the hair and the eyebrows, your accent is also something which is a hallmark of where you belong to. There is absolutely no sense in feeling ashamed for this. Carry it with pride! Your work and ethics matter, not your accent.
Secondly, do not cut yourself off from things connected to your dialect – songs, movies, plays, rhymes, phrases, etc. Make sure you take a responsibility to pass it across the next generation. If you are a family already with kids or someone from the next generation, do not embarrass your dialect and its features infront of them. Introduce them to the dialect and its components and let them learn it. Learn from you. When you are good with your own dialect, there is a confidence which cannot come with any other language. Go ahead learn multiple languages, but do not at any cost forget the local native dialect.
Your native dialect or the mother tongue as we call it, must never ever in your life become a concern for shame, embarrassment or dishnour. Carry your dialect as a badge of honour and social richness. Tell people about it and if people still keep laughing over it – Ignore. It takes a lot of intelligence to understand what is written here. Not eveyrone will. So keep calm and go ahead.
So this was my message for tonight. I really wish people who have already gone ahead and severed their ties with their mother tongue thinking it was primitive and embarassing to keep strigns attached, think once more and go back. Do share with me or in the comment section – what makes your local dialect special?
Always ranting, Rantzaada.
The 11 o' clock diary 