Reshmi Nair LING 207 Proposal

I am an Indian. I was born and brought up in Dubai, where I did my elementary school in a private Indian school and had friends who were North Indians and spoke Hindi as a native language. I was also taught my native language, Malayalam by speaking the language at home and with family friends.

As a child growing up we watched a lot of both the Malayalam and Hindi movies. We were part of a religious group to learn more about our culture, where we were taught to read and write in my native language, Malayalam.

I did my middle school and part high school in Kerala, India where most of my friends were South Indians and so the common language spoken was Malayalam and we were taught Hindi as a subject.

At home, I speak Malayalam with my parents. With my sisters I grew up speaking in Malayalam but now we code switch but mainly talk in English. With my niece, everybody in the family always talks to her in Malayalam since she is only a year old.

While the family is in the kitchen cooking, we always talk in Malayalam since the dishes will be Indian and we would have to add the seasonings that are particular to our culture. With my external family, we always talk in Malayalam. Some of my external family has their children who were born and brought up here and so they do not speak Malayalam and we converse with them in English.

With our family friends it varies since with the parents we usually speak in Malayalam and with the children we speak mostly in English, some parents do ask their children to be spoken to in Malayalam while the children themselves would rather speak in English but some parents have said that they would rather teach their children English and would appreciate if we conversed with them in English.

Some of the North Indian families that I know would always speak in Hindi or their native language to the children and say that the children will learn English at school so we do speak Hindi or our own native language at home.

Malayalam is a language that belongs to the Dravidian family of languages while Hindi belongs to the Indo-European family of languages.