Recently I received the Census 2021 form in the snail mail. It said right on the envelope that I was legally bound to respond to it. Don’t you love it when they send you a letter with that text right on the envelope? Well, at least it was not a traffic ticket. But I did go on Google to check that they were telling me was truth and not like the TV licence thing. Oh, that’s a different story altogether.
Anyway, I know census is important and I expected that they
would be doing this online this time, so I didn’t mind filling out a form. It
was slightly longer than I expected but not too bad. I struggled with the
educational qualifications bit, no, no, I did go to school, honest. I went to
school in
The biggest issue was the language question. They asked what was my primary language and I got stuck. French and German were out, while I do know a few words of those, at most I can say my name and that I am hungry. Spanish is even less of a candidate as my favourite sentence in that has something to do with a tomato that’s reserved for the soup.
At the moment I speak English most of the time but then I
live in
But that was years ago and since then things have changed a
lot. In addition to learning English in school, I fell in love with the habit
of reading and Enid Blyton, Ian Fleming and Arthur Conan Doyle contributed to
my education as much as my English teacher, Mr. Kaushik. Add to that my love
for the action movies in English - James Bond, Mission Impossible,
And that was my problem. The question didn’t call for my mother tongue or any kind of official language but “What language do you use most at home?” So, I tried to sort this out with a few questions to myself.
What language do I think in? Both. Depends on which topic I am thinking about but these days is 80-20, 80% English, 20% Hindi.
What language do I dream in? Again, both. It depends on the characters in my dream.
What language do I speak at home? Hmmm, considering that I live alone that is covered by the thinking language, but let’s say what language do I use with my family? That depends on the family member I am speaking with but the family members I speak to most are bilingual and which language we use depends on which language we start speaking in.
Ultimately, I answered Hindi based on the last two questions.
What language do I curse in? While I do curse fluently in both languages (and a couple more) when I am genuinely pissed off and need heavy curse words that would be unprintable, I resort to Hindi.
What language do I do my calculations in? I can do maths in English and I can count to ten in French and German, if you gave me a column of figures to add and I had to it in a hurry I would have to use Hindi numbers.
Problem solved. But it was quite an interesting analytical trip down the labyrinth of my brain. I usually enjoy those.
So, what language do you parlez-vous in?
