i read somewhere that the average American has a vocabulary of 5000 words...he or she can happily go through life with that repertoire without being challenged by a need to find a new word to describe something.
i find that scary.
i know much fewer than 5000 words in my native language (which is odiya) and whenever i go home i realize how limited that is when i want to communicate with people outside my social circle.
i find that terrifying. compound that a thousand times over, a million times over with the fact that i am no different from the greater majority of people similar to me and well...

why am i petrified of this fact? its not like i or the others i think are similar to me want for a method or language to communicate. we usually know languages over and above the ones our great grandparents knew and if ever we lack for description in any language, we throw in one or two in to reinforce, reiterate and basically get our point through.

i am terrified for what i am losing in translation. translation of the hopes, fears and memories of generations before me to the ones after me. translation of the sights, smells and noises that were and that are. translations of the labour performed by nondescript heroes, forgotten and unsung, even unrecognised as anything but ordinary, in building today's generations and the dreams of tomorrow's children.
my thought, my actions, my dreams are different from my father's and my mother's. but surely there is something i can carry over, surely there is something that they did to make me who i am, the words i say, the things i do, and the things i do not say or do. for better or for worse, that surely is a great part of who i am and something i can and will treasure like the chingudi bhajaa my mother cooks for me.

why language? because when a child comes into this world, the first time he takes his place among us as a person is when he calls out 'ma' or 'baba' or 'bhai' or 'dei'. it therefore is the stepping stone and ultimately a window to who we are. i say 'mummy' when i usually call out to my mother and there are times when i say 'ma' instead when i'm talking about her in odiya to someone just because 'mummy' sounds irreconcilably alien and if i were to say that, i am subconciously aware that the intimacy of that conversation will be irrevocably lost. a sudden alienation born.

i always wanted to learn french because i thought it was a beautiful language. closer to home, i always found bengali langurously sweet. my own language, odiya, i never learnt to read or write because of a stubborn (one quality i showed very early signs of) resistance to any 'learning' over and above i had to do in school. as i grew up, i had english, hindi and sanskrit to take care of, particularly hindi which single handedly massacred my exam score averages through many an academic season. all the odiya i knew, i knew from talking to (and getting a talking to from) my parents and siblings and a long time later in college from conversing with friends. so in essence my knowledge of odiya remained very functional - never beautiful, and i think the biggest reason why in my urges to learn new languages, my own language never figured, ever.

as the subliminal battle goes on between the urge to be synchronously similar in cosmopolitan correctness, and the need to be uniquely identifiable - all i know in my heart is that when a language dies, inevitably a people are lost. i want to learn my mother tongue. i want to know odiya like and as an oriya.