When Jasper and I arrived in Jersey, a little over two months ago, the first thing my family noticed was Jasper’s accent. It would be safe to say that it had more than a little bit of an Indian twang to it. It wasn’t only that his ‘w’s were sounding a lot like ‘v’s. His whole intonation had an unfamiliar lilt, the way he lined up his words in a sentence wasn’t always traditional and his emphasis often landed in a surprising place.
It would do a disservice to Jasper’s superior hindi consonant pronunciation to try to mimic him, but it would come out something like this:
‘Vere ve going now?’ while I might say “Where are we going?”
Or
‘Sun is avake?’ while I might ask “Is the sun awake?’
Or
‘Vere bunny is?’ while I might ask ‘Where’s bunny?’
Within a couple of days, however, Jasper quickly adopted some of my mother’s turns of phrase, most notably upgrading his seemingly eternal search for his favourite bunny toy by scouring the house saying ‘Where could he be? Where could bunny be?’. (For the record, he was always exactly where Jasper had left him, at either the top or bottom of the stairs.)
The way Jasper speaks is something that Dylan and I have discussed at length, in fact, even before he started to talk. We are as competitive over which of our accents Jasper will adopt as we are over whether he’ll prefer Marmite or Vegemite and which team he really wants to win the Ashes. We are, however, united in our conviction to avoid a Mid-Atlantic accent and for this reason have already ruled out the American school as an educational institute. That said, neither Dylan nor I had noticed quite how Indian Jasper was sounding until family, friends and random strangers pointed it out to us.
Six weeks surrounded by English accents, and predominantly southern, RP (received pronunciation) or RP-adjacent accents at that, seems to have done the trick as far as bringing Jasper’s pronunciation back in line with at least half of his heritage. And better than that, I think the discussions we have had with him around his pronunciation and the difference between a ‘wuh’ and a ‘vuh’ sound have even begun to make him consciously aware of different accents, which I see as evidence of my linguistic genes having made their way into the recipe that gave us Jasper. If I have a party trick, and I’m not saying that I have ever done this at a party even when parties were things that I attended, but if I were to be asked if I have a party trick, I would probably answer yes and then I would take the asker on a verbal tour of the United Kingdom by way of regional accents. From London out east and up to Norfolk, across and down to the West Country, up through Bristol to south Wales and up to north Wales, taking a quick jaunt over to Dublin and then up into Northern Ireland before cruising back on over to Liverpool, whizzing through Manchester and Leeds before heading up through Newcastle towards Scotland, dipping into Glasgow before getting lost in the rolling hills of the highlands. Now that I don’t attend parties and have no need for this trick, I put most of my effort into perfecting my Australian accent when reading Bluey books to Jasper and I take his laughter as applause.
Languages and, by extension, accents have always been my thing (which makes it all the more embarrassing that I hadn’t really taken on board how wonky Jasper’s accent had already gone in the few, short months that he had been speaking complete words.) At school I studied French and German, and at university I added Mandarin Chinese to the mix, before learning some Burmese during my time in Myanmar and making a half-hearted attempt at Hindi in my first few months here in Mumbai. I love languages and I love learning languages. But more than that, I am finding, right now, that I absolutely love watching Jasper learn language.
In the time between us leaving for our long holiday in Jersey and us returning to Mumbai, Jasper, and the other members of his neighbourhood baby gang have all discovered verbal communication. That’s not to say they were mute before; far from it. But now that they have learned to string words together into sentences, their relationships are able to develop in leaps and bounds. And it is magical to watch.
I am sure that all the parents are enjoying watching their little ones finding their groove and forming more meaningful friendships, but I would hazard that I might be one of the few spectators who actually knows how it feels, too. When I was studying Mandarin in Taipei, many of my classmates were Japanese or Korean and they did not speak any English. From the way they interacted with their compatriots, I could see that they were fun and I could deduce that I probably had something in common with many of them, but I had absolutely no way of communicating beyond simple gestures and over-exaggerated facial expressions. As the year progressed, with every chapter of our textbook that we covered and with every hundred or so vocabulary words that we all learned, I was slowly able to get to know these people. An eavesdropper might have thought we were speaking gibberish, given our imperfect tonal inflections and grammatical errors, but we knew exactly what we meant because we were, quite literally, all on the same page.
And this is how it appears to be for Jasper and his little friends. They can talk to one another, ask each other questions and work out the answers without an adult interpreting. With his school friends, he can now discuss who has pets and who doesn’t; which animals they like and which they don’t; who wants a cat and who once rode a horse. June’s theme was pet animals, you see, and spending a month learning, singing and making art around the subject has unlocked the door to a far deeper understanding of one another.
On playdates, instead of me suggesting what he might like to share and putting food on the table at what I deem an appropriate time, Jasper can now ask his guests ‘would you like to see my books?’, ‘would you like to play magnatiles?’, or ‘would you like a snack?’. And the guests, in turn, don’t have to just go along with it, they are more than capable of saying ‘no, thank you. I’d like to play with your cars.’
Of course, the word ‘mine’ is a fan favourite on playdates, expressed with increasing frequency, volume and vehemence as the playdate wears on. And then there are the words which Jasper’s nanny thinks might be English and which I think might be Hindi. It turns out, they are in Jasper’s own language. I have had to explain to him that, in some cases, he needs to drop some of the terms which we adopted when he was first grasping spoken language (such as an-na for aeroplane and uccaducca for helicopter) because nobody outside the immediate family knows what he means. I refuse to correct him on rainbrella, however, because, well - come on - it’s so perfectly descriptive!
Even if my ears are deaf to Jasper’s Indian accent, however, there are some local linguistic quirks for which I am on the listen-out: misuse of the words ‘only’ and ‘even’. For some reason this is a universal problem which runs through all levels of society. Here in India, ‘even’ takes on the meaning of ‘also’ and ‘only’ takes on the meaning of ‘just’.
Our driver tells me ‘I can park here only’, leaving me wondering if he is, indeed, only allowed to park there, or if, in fact, he means that he will just park there - in a location which is nice and close and won’t require me to alert him in advance to my needing collecting.
Neighbourhood mums chime in to whatsapp conversations about needing cleaners or laundry people saying ‘even I am looking for someone’, making themselves sound aggrieved that even someone like them is wallowing in the depths of whatever search is in question, when I think what they actually mean is that they are also looking for someone.
It will be very hard to explain to Jasper why some of these local language flavours are not for him; hard because I don’t want to offend any of his friends and hard because, despite having studied a lot of languages, I am no teacher and am not convinced I’ll be very good at breaking the English language down into bite-sized sense. But I will have to try, because if Jasper turns up in Australia or the UK sounding like a small, pale caricature of a bollywood star, it’s going to raise some eyebrows.
Did I mention my other party trick and another genetic trait that Jasper seems to have inherited? No? Well, I/ we can raise each of our eyebrows independently.
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