Some things are expressed only in the language we first learned to love, and others are best said only after we have learned to leave that language behind. One of the quieter contradictions of growing up in urban India is that we transition between languages so swiftly that we rarely pause to notice what we carry across and what we leave behind.
Journeying through the phases of life, where there is regional language and mother-tongue predominantly occupying our childhood memories, and then a certain language (English) in school and college, and then there’s the dreamworld of the language of television and the internet, and the gradual realization that the language of true expression most precisely has never been the one with which we were initially identified. Slowly the language becomes less a matter of expression, exchange, communication, and connection; and it becomes more of geography, a way of signalling who we are, where we belong, what we aspire to be, and sometimes, who we would rather not be.
An individual from any native place might code-switch between several languages throughout the day: mother tongue at home, English at work, Hindi with friends, Hinglish on social media, and childhood memory in Marathi, Bengali, Tamil or Malayalam. Is it simply code-switching or switching selves? And when we speak of English particularly, in Urban India, English has completed a fascinating migration from being a colonial legacy to a pragmatic marker of class and professional competence. Shedding the dusty weight of its colonial origin and the austere formality of the corporate office, the language has transformed into a second skin, that of a deliberate, finely woven tapestry of identity, mood, and self-defence. Ultimately, people no longer simply learn the language to be understood; they begin to curate its tone, its pauses, and its subtle detachment to construct a sophisticated, armoured persona navigating the beautiful, chaotic friction of the contemporary Indian city. The digital age has significantly accelerated this transformation, and there is now a recognizable urban online English: concise, witty, sarcastic, emotionally articulate but lacking earnestness. Efficiently knowing how to differentiate between being vulnerable and appearing vulnerable in a world where every caption, tweet, prompt, and post can become a part of one’s public identity, language has become a form of personal branding.
Language does not merely carry thoughts; it shapes the emotional distance between us and what we are trying to express. The literal meaning may be identical when speaking in two different languages, but the emotional consequences may not be the same when saying the same thing in the two languages. With certain freedom in vocabulary, English, for many urban Indians, has become the language in which difficult things can be made manageable. It provides vocabulary for experiences that earlier generations may not have named so easily: anxiety, boundaries, emotional availability, attachment, burnout, identity, etc. English can sometimes offer escape from inherited identities, allowing a person to become less obedient, less embarrassed, less constrained by the expectations embedded in family language. And hence, the language cannot simply be understood as a colonial residue or a class marker anymore. It has become a language of possibility. But this possibility comes with a strange cost, where reinventing oneself may completely leave us unguarded, separating a feeling from its inheritance.
Whereas English carries the sense of freedom and allows the comfort of a distance, inherited languages contain more than words; they carry the emotional architecture of childhood, affection expressed, anger disguised, respect demanded, shame transmitted, and love assumed rather than articulated! Losing instinctive fluency in an inherited language can feel like losing access to a particular space within, losing connection with history and identity. A mother tongue helps collapse the separation and distance created by acquired language that comes with a pressure of performance. Beneath the surface of a linguistic anxiety where one is less afraid of being wrong and more fearful of sounding unsophisticated, there is this quieter solace of native language, one that feels like home, one that offers comfort and safety. It is the language in which someone called us in from the street, a language in which we were told to eat, a language in which we were frightened, forgiven, compared, praised and occasionally humiliated, a language where affection learned its tone and spontaneity.
Losing fluency in an inherited language is a loss where spontaneity ends, and translation begins. And translation introduces a diminutive but sizable distance between feeling and expression. Beyond the feeling of liberation in distance, inventing oneself, and the ease of confessing in a language that does not carry the weight of our childhood and generations around the vocabulary, inherited languages are the ones where we remember ourselves. Our mother tongue carries the expectations of parents, the vocabulary of grandparents, the memory of the social world where we were raised, and the cultural essence of our belonging. The silence around the sentence is lost while translating and existing in an acquired language.
Surprisingly and reassuringly, though, the younger generations are returning to their languages; they are voyaging home! Regional cinemas are becoming the fashion of cities; songs, dialects, poetry, literature, and local humour are finding newer audiences. Once embarrassed by their inherited language, people are now using the language deliberately, proudly, and defiantly. Not merely consuming one’s mother tongue but also inhabiting it emotionally is the new norm, where the pressure and caution are not whether it can be used for a caption extraordinaire, but the ease and satisfaction of whether we can be ordinary in the language. Audible at weddings, family conversations, jokes, innermost circles and yet ceases to exist when we begin to think, reason, argue, dream, desire, and yet exists, not in the declarations of linguistic pride, but in whether a language is available for small and unremarkable experiences where life is built!
India has always been linguistically diverse; to have a single language contain its identity where people live with selves that do not perfectly overlap. One language may hold our professional intelligence while the other may hold our childhood; one language may hold our humour while the other may hold our longing, and sometimes the most important things exist in the space between them. The old idea of fluency assumes that a language should give us access to the whole self, but perhaps the multilingual self is built differently. Perhaps we are not divided by our languages so much as assembled by them. Each one remembers something the others have forgotten. Each one permits a version of us that the others cannot quite reach. And so, the question facing urban India may not be whether English will replace our mother tongues. It may be what happens when no single language remains sufficient to contain a person. Maybe that is not cultural failure. Maybe it is simply what it means to grow up between worlds.
We leave home carrying one language, and we enter the world acquiring another. And somewhere along the way, as we evolve to move between versions of ourselves, without quite noticing, we become fluent in the distance between them.
Note from the Columnist-
This Column is inspired by a young, talented girl, Srimukhi Krishnkumar, a pass-out of Wisdom World School, Wakad, Pune, who approached me to provide some input for her research article on Linguistic Identity: English-medium education and a loss of the mother tongue among urban teens in India, for VOGUE India. It has been a great honour for me to participate in her survey, and with great pride, I extend my heartiest congratulations on her incredible talent and potential that won her the final round in VOGUE India, and her piece outstandingly holding up among the Top 10 pieces selected for publication. Best Wishes to her in her literary journey ahead and all her future endeavours.
About the Columnist
Jyoti Jha is a bestselling and award-winning author, TEDx speaker, and winner of the TOI Write India initiative. A passionate storyteller and literary advocate, she serves as Senior Editor and Podcast Host at Today Magazine, where she brings together journalism, literature, and meaningful conversations. She is also the Chief Coordinator of Let’s Inspire Bihar’s Literary Chapter, working to promote literary and cultural engagement. As Curator of the LIB Literature Festival 2026, she is committed to creating platforms for writers, thinkers, and readers to connect and exchange ideas. Through her multifaceted work, Jha continues to contribute significantly to India’s contemporary literary and cultural landscape.
