“my valued associates themselves flounder when they have to give expression to their innermost thoughts. They are strangers in their own homes. Their vocabulary in the mother tongue is so limited that they cannot always finish their speech without having recourse to English words and even sentences. Nor can they exist without English books. They often write to one another in English. I cite the case of my companions to show how deep the evil has gone. For we have made a conscious effort to mend ourselves.”
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Source: Harijan (30 Jul 1938), 'My Own Experience'; reproduced in Towards New Education (1953), pp. 50-51.
About this quote
When schooling happens in a borrowed tongue, people can lose the words for their own inner life and end up fluent in everything but themselves. Thought narrows to the vocabulary you truly own, so reclaiming your first language is less nostalgia than a way of feeling and thinking in full again.
When to use it
- A grandchild raised only in a second language struggles to comfort a dying grandparent in her words.
- An engineer hides behind jargon because a plain description of his idea keeps slipping away from him.
- A town reopens its classes in the native language so children can name their own feelings again.