There’s language in the eye, the cheek, the lip

The other night, my 11-year-old brother teased our mum about her pronunciation of the word ‘queen.’ Apparently, she had pronounced the ‘q’ weird. Amma just laughed and commented some version of her usual ‘I got you here because of this English, it’s good enough’.

This is a common occurrence in our household; my parents’ Indian tongues slipping and stuttering over English sounds that don’t match up the same to their native Malayalam, while my brother and I offer corrections. There are also similar inverted occurrences where our parents tease us back for stumbling over Malayalam words we’re not accustomed to using, or had just heard of and attempted to pronounce, curious to know its meaning. Maybe this is a mutual language exchange, but oftentimes I think it’s just loss. Take it like this: despite Malayalam being the language I was born into, I think in English now. Even though I am fortunate to still have Malayalam in some way – in that I speak it fluently, even if my reading only consists of slowly sounding out letters until they become a word I recognise, and my writing is limited to scratching out my name in corners of my study notes when I cwan’t focus – its use in my life is limited to the time I spend at home talking to my parents, or to relatives back in India. As a result, my vocabulary only consists of the everyday speech; of places, food, and the ‘what I’ve been up to recently’. Sometimes I’ll watch a Malayalam movie and need English subtitles to put together meaning from unfamiliar