Mother tongue

As a child, Lily Iervasi remembers her grandmother speaking Motu, one of more than 800 distinct indigenous languages that make up Papua New Guinea’s rich linguistic tapestry (possibly a promotional article from ANU) “Lily’s grandmother hailed from Hanuabada, a small town outside Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. She met Lily’s white Australian grandfather there post-WW2, and they married, eventually returning to Australia to raise their family. They agreed that their children would only speak English; assimilation was the cultural fashion at the time, Lily says. “They wanted their children to fit in.”

Her grandmother learned to assimilate too. A quick learner, she picked up English from her children and wide social network.

A few years ago, she was diagnosed with dementia. As the end neared, she started losing her adopted language. English words and phrases slipped through the cracks of memory. Eventually, all she was left with was her original tongue, Motu.”

Mukul Kesvan writes about his father’s death (posted before)in Do anglophones paddle in the shallows? “But the middle-of-the-night question—what language do you scream in when you’re tumbled from your bed at 2am by an earthquake—remains. In the last week of my father’s life, his mind abandoned his hospital bed present, and ranged back to his childhood. He called to his mother, who had died when he was a boy, and spoke to his grandfather, who had raised him. For all the languages he had learnt over a very long life, and despite his own acknowledgment of the primacy of English, he died in Tamil.”