My Roommate's Language

My roommate claims he speaks Kannada - and truly when he converses with his friends I cannot decipher even a word of what they say. However, when he talks to his mom much of his speech is intelligible to me. It does sound like he has a bit of a different accent from my family. I then hear his mom and I understand her speech very clearly - very similar to my mom’s. His family was Telugu at some point, moving to Bangalore a few generations ago.

Bangalore is just that kind of city - there are varieties of Dakhni, a dialect of Urdu native to Hyderabad and its surrounding regions because of migrants from Hyderabad centuries ago. Bangalore is a cosmopolitan city in terms of languages and has been since its founding by Kempegowda.

The city at its inception boasted some 300 lakes and 10+ languages. Now the number of languages is probably close to 30+ and the nubmber of lakes <100 - a rapid sign of how India’s cities are modernizing to the detriment of the local natural environment and nationalizing to the benefit of India’s ambitious rising middle class.

The variety of speech in a city like Bangalore however causes a lot of interesting categorization problems. Does my roommate speak Kannada, is he Kannada? Is his family Kannada? The relationship between Telugu and Kannada as languages is long and enmeshed. Telugu script was adapted from Kannada script about 1000 years ago, while the Telugu language itself split off from Kannada and the other South Indian languages at a much earlier time. Kings from what is today Kannada-speaking land, who themselves were native speakers of other languages were famous patrons and authors of Telugu literature.

There exist lots of people who speak the way Shashank does and have throughout history: a form of Kannada-ized Telugu at home and a very Bangalore Kannada in the streets. While Shashank’s Kannada would be understandable to people from the north of Karnataka, those people’s Kannada would be very hard to decipher for him. The nature of language comprehension is such that there are many one-way understandings. One person might understand the other, but not be understood themselves.

These little funny stories of language pervade the Indian subcontinent - one-way understanding, overlapping words and sociolinguistic prestige of registers dictating their usage. The more I learn about Indian languages, especially from the brilliant TianChangWen on Twitter, the more the layer of reality and social relations and history becomes clear to me. It’s addicting.

For now, I don’t speak to my roommate in Telugu much since he doesn’t get a large portion of it, and we converse mostly in English. The occasional ingredient when we’re cooking is easier to refer to with its Hindi/Urdu, Telugu or Kannada name, but aside from that we just don’t think about the very interesting language question.