Desi Boy

On Jasper's very Indian accent.

I couldn’t tell you precisely when it happened, but at some point during the past few months, Jasper’s accent has shifted from ‘Ooh, am I hearing a slight Indian influence in there?’ to ‘Oh wow, he’s so desi’. (Desi [day-see] being a Hindi slang for Indian—at heart).

I was in denial about him sounding Indian for a long time, for the simple reason that I couldn’t hear it. I mean, sure, I knew he was rolling his ‘R’s, approximating his ‘th’s somewhere between a ‘T’ and a ‘D’, and incorrectly deploying the word ‘only’ at the end of sentences. And, of course, I was fully aware of his head and hand mannerisms, but I didn’t really appreciate just how strong his accent was until I observed it from afar. And this from someone who prides herself in being able to speak multiple languages with a certain degree of accuracy in the pronunciation, and who rolls out regional British accents as a party trick. It turns out that, as deep into Jasper’s phonetic framework the Indian accent has burrowed, it has taken just as firm a grip on my ears. 

The first time I heard it was when I was in Jersey earlier this year, awaiting news of my visa. I had just spent a morning at a playgroup, surrounded by little British children chattering to themselves and their mothers, and had called to speak with Jasper while I had lunch. It was then, sitting with my mother at her kitchen bench, peering at his funny little face on the screen of my phone, that I suddenly realised just how foreign he sounds. And it’s not only the pronunciation of certain letter combinations: it’s his intonation, his emphasis, his turns of phrase and the spattering of Hindi he increasingly weaves through his speech. If you didn’t see his face, I am 100% sure you would not place him as British or Australian, and about 90% sure you wouldn’t even guess he was from outside South Asia. 

As you can see from this video, even he doesn’t know he’s from outside South Asia.

(I have really no idea what he was talking about with the crab spotting!)

His communicative camouflage in Mumbai is completely understandable. He was 16 months old when we moved here; he said his first words here and continues to develop his command of language here. And, as we learn mostly through imitation, it makes perfect sense that he is, therefore, also picking up his accent from the people around him. But the logic behind it doesn’t make it any less of a gut punch that he hasn’t chosen to emulate my careful command of ‘BBC English’, or even Dylan’s slouchy Australian speech patterns (Australian-ish, he’s not a very aussie Aussie). Here I am, reading Paddington, and Thomas the Tank Engine (although, personally I have the most fun delivering that in a low, lyrical Welsh accent) and all of Julia Donaldson’s back catalogue. Dylan takes up Bluey, Possum Magic, Wombat Stew and the Gumnut Babies with the same fervour, but to no avail. The demands and commands which come back at us are deeply and distinctly subcontinental. 

Now that I am alert to it, I hear it more and I do try and correct him on occasion. I try to make him say ‘boat’ like ‘oat’ or ‘goat’, instead of his preferred version of ‘bought’. I push him to say ‘here’ as in ‘beer’, rather than ‘hyerr’ (as seen in the video above). I say ‘India’, while he says ‘Injya’; I say ‘three’ while he says ‘tdree’. Where I don’t pick him up is when he throws in Hindi words because, let’s face it, it’s not only pretty cool, it’s also enormously useful for him to understand Hindi. 

I studied Mandarin Chinese at University and I absolutely loved it: I loved speaking it, understanding it, training my brain to read a logographic language system instead of an alphabet-based one, living and breathing it while working in Beijing and appreciating it artistically whether through calligraphy, graphics, propaganda or pop art. I always imagined that I would teach a child of mine Chinese and that they would then go on to thank me for giving them a head start in the race to do business with China. But no. The world has changed, China is persona non grata, and India is now where the focus lies and this means Hindi stands more of a chance as the super-language of the future. 

Not that Jasper knows that yet. For him, his basic Hinglish is simply how he communicates. I am pretty sure he hasn’t said the word ‘yes’ since some time in late 2023, now choosing, instead, to use the Hindi word ‘ha’, with a customary bob of his head to one side, to indicate agreement. While we were in Australia over Christmas, I realised that this response to an offer of food or drink was confusing to anyone other than his ‘India family’ as he has taken to calling Dylan and me. An Aussie family member would offer a snack, and Jasper would apparently laugh in their face—’ha!’, while tipping his head quizzically to one side. And then he would reach out for whatever it was and look puzzled as to why it wasn’t forthcoming. Even after I had explained that ‘ha’ meant yes, and that the side-to-side head bob which, to us, looks more like a head shake, was also a way of saying yes (or good, or maybe, or OK, or I understand, depending on the context), it took a while for Jasper to get what he wanted. 

I have always wondered if, in the same way handwriting experts pop up in crime thrillers, there are forensic accent experts who can tell a person’s life story just from hearing them pronounce a few words. And if these people and this area of expertise really do exist, what they might deduce from my own accent, given all the international influences it has been under over the years. I am now far less interested in me and all-focussed on Jasper, however, and whether or not he will always have a lingering South Asian zing hidden within his speech patterns. 

It does appear that Jasper himself can hear accents. Nothing annoys him more than me reading his Spider-Man comic book in a B-grade range of American accents, or Bluey in my mildly offensive, ‘best Australian’ accent. While we were in Aus, he seemed to make some attempt to blend in by adding a few more syllables to his pronunciation of the word ‘me’, resulting in something which sounded like ‘muaiey’. ‘Pass it to muaiey’, ‘that belongs to muaiey’. Since we returned to India, however, any hint of that is long gone. 

On top of his affirmative ‘ha’, Jasper has recently started adding a few more Hindi words into his mix. The other day he was telling me a story (which didn’t make much sense to me, but bear with me) about ‘when I got in my gaadi, I saw the pineapples’. Gaadi means car. A few moments later he told me earnestly that ‘Adi’s didi has gone on chutti’, letting me know that his friend Adi’s nanny had taken leave for a few days. He also announces his bowel movements with a ‘shu shu hai’ for numbers ones, and ‘boops hai’ for something more substantial. ‘Hai’ is the third person singular of ‘hona’ which is the verb ‘To Be’. So he’s essentially saying ‘there is wee’ or ‘there are poops’ (with a subtle addition of a nasal ‘n’ on the end of ‘hain’). It’s endearing right up until the point when he chooses his preferred assistant, at which point either Dylan or I ceases to be charmed by it. 

His all time favourite joke is to call everyone ‘bhaiya’ which means brother, or dude, man or mate. As his tiredness from having dropped his afternoon nap tips over into hysteria every evening, I become ‘mama bhaiya’, his nanny Seema becomes ‘Seema bhaiya’, and his toy bunny is ‘Bunny Bhaiya’. We all get wild, cackling ‘Goodnight bhaiya’s’ as his brain fizzes with every funny, silly thing he’s done that day. 

The evening sillies

Despite not really being able to hear the severity of his accent myself, I have started trying to film him chatting away to himself, because I am quite sure these videos will have some mileage when he’s older and because I do think he will either lose it, or learn to tone it down, once he starts at his new international school in August. His teachers will mostly be British, and his classmates may include a few more foreign children, so the chances of him sticking to his current phonetic toolkit should be slimmer. On a recent colouring spree I tricked him into at home, he spent a long time describing the colours by their related berries. Except the way he says it is more like 'bedrdries'.

Here he is being interviewed, by me, about the list of Indian national leaders his school had shared, one of whom he was required to dress as for school one day last week. I ended up sending him dressed as Narendra Modi, on the basis that someone who was hanged (perhaps incorrectly) for murdering a British soldier (Bhagat Singh) or someone who maintained strong friendships with Adolf Hitler and his merry band of fascists (Subhash Chandra Bose) seemed to require more complicated explanation than a three-year-old needs to know. 

One thing I have tried and failed to capture on camera (because he is not a performing monkey, as he tells me in not so many words on a regular basis) is his tendency to absent-mindedly break into a rousing rendition of the ‘Hare Krishna’ song while he rearranges his Lego. He only really gets as far as Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, and then he starts again, but it’s a real ear-worm, I tell you. It won’t be long before I am humming it to myself as I work.