Another tongue

‘It was really funny’, the little boy was telling his grandfather about what happened at school… ‘The new student speaks English in a funny vernacular accent. He was mispronouncing all the words and we made fun of him. You should have seen his teary face!’ The grandfather calmly spoke out, ‘If he speaking with an accent, it means he knows another language other than English. You know only one. Surely he is better off than you.’ The lad understood his mistake and promised to apologise and learn his colleague’s language.’

This story was told by Sonia Shirsat at the Zone Conference of JCI – Zone XI. As a Youth Icon, the internationally renowned celebrity singer was speaking about moving ‘Beyond Borders’. In a riveting presentation using audio visuals, she described her own crossing of various borders: from mind to vision, from geographical ones to organisational ones, from belief to practices, from past glory to new challenges

This Monday Muse just focuses on the borders of the tongue that Sonia crossed so significantly. Her greatest claim to fame is her fluency over the Portugese Fado, a language she mastered long after her college days. Her ability to cross the borders of various genre of music has made her a globally sought performer who can, in the course of a single show, move across multiple languages and styles.

So often, so many of us mock people who are trying to converse to us in our language. We ignore that the other person is actually transcending the borders of tongue to communicate with us. Besides accent, we also ridicule dialects. We must move beyond the borders of a single language and travel the trip of multiple tongues. We may not master every language but we will advance as communicators every time we try.

While love should never dim for our mother tongue

Let’s move beyond borders to acquire another one!