Love and Marriage in Telugu Or Tamil, in Hindi Or Sindhi: How to Save Native Language in the Diaspora

A few months ago, I came across an account on Instagram run by Saivarun Dronavalli, a young Indian American father. Though he was raised in a Telugu household, Dronavalli evidently did not learn to speak the language fluently. Now, after getting married and having a child of his own, he was trying to improve his Telugu. Dronavalli’s motivation? He wanted his son to learn Telugu and thus wanted to learn the language himself. Dronavalli’s page features several videos of him attempting to speak in Telugu. Many of these videos contain supportive messages from other Telugu-Americans, which praise Dronavalli’s efforts and applaud his quest to reconnect with his roots.

Dronavalli’s experience is not uncommon among Indian Americans born and raised in the United States. The story often goes like this, and I’ll illustrate it with the example of an imaginary Telugu American girl, Lalitha. 

Lalitha was born and raised in the United States. Her parents emigrated from Andhra Pradesh to the United States before she was born. Lalitha’s parents spoke to her in Telugu in her early childhood, and she grew up listening to (and speaking) the language. In time, Lalitha started school and began hearing (and speaking) English. All of Lalitha’s conversations with her friends at school happened in English, too. At home, Lalitha slipped into English in conversations with her parents. They would demand that she speak in Telugu, and they would, of course, speak to her in Telugu. Yet she would respond in English in many instances. 

Concerned by this turn of events, Lalitha’s parents enrolled her in Telugu classes. Every weekend, they would dutifully drop her off at and pick her up from the local middle school, where the classes were conducted. Lalitha learned to read and write Telugu. She learned how to conjugate verbs and how to recite Telugu poetry. But when she spoke to her Telugu classmates after class—many of whom she also went to school with—their conversations happened in English. Lalitha’s Telugu was passable. She could understand the language well enough, and she could hold some simple conversation, enough to communicate with her grandparents back home in India. When she visited India, her accented Telugu—interspersed with English words—made it obvious that she was an “NRI kid.”

Lalitha went to college away from home. She dormed on campus. Most of her friends didn’t speak Telugu, and she spoke in English with the few that did. Telugu was reserved for calls to her parents (which were conducted in a mix of Telugu and English) and when she went back home for winter or summer break. It wasn’t that Lalitha actively abhorred speaking in Telugu. Rather, the fact simply remained that Lalitha was surrounded by English. The overwhelming majority of content she consumed was in English. And Telugu was warm and homely—just like the pappu (dal) and avakaya pacchadi (mango pickle) she relished. But it was a speck in the vast ocean that was her life in the United States.

Lalitha met her romantic partner in college. His name was Sanjay. Like her, he was born and raised in the United States. His parents came to the United States from Bihar, and so he spoke decent Hindi, marginally better than Lalitha’s Telugu. Lalitha and Sanjay got married a few years after they graduated college. Both snagged good, six-figure IT jobs and were squarely situated in the upper-middle-class echelon of American society. A few years after they got married, the couple had their first child: a baby boy who they named Pranav. The proud parents wanted to extend to their son—a second-generation Indian American—the culture and language that they grew up with. Sanjay tried to speak to his son in the Hindi that he knew. Lalitha spoke to the infant in the Telugu that she knew. But the conversations between the couple happened in English, and for the most part, that’s what Pranav heard. And it was all too easy for Pranav’s parents to fall back to English even when they were talking to him, for that was simply what they were most comfortable with. His grandparents—that is, Sanjay and Lalitha’s parents—spoke to him in Hindi and Telugu, respectively, when they saw him. Ultimately, though, Pranav learned little Telugu or Hindi. Sure, he picked up a few words here and there. But he was raised in English more than he was in Telugu or Hindi.

I hope that Dronavalli’s endeavor to teach his son Telugu by himself becoming fluent in the language is successful. His effort, to be sure, is laudable. But it also exemplifies the difficulty of preserving and passing on Indian languages in diaspora contexts. You may well have read Lalitha’s story above and have thought, “I (or my American-born child) know our Indian native language perfectly well!” This is an entirely valid response, for I personally know many American-born Indian Americans that can fluently speak their native languages. Likewise, some of you may respond, “I know parents who’ve successfully taught their children both of their native languages!” This contention, too, is accurate, and I do not mean to suggest that such an arrangement is impossible. 

Though the scenarios I’ve detailed above—where language can be successfully transmitted in diaspora contexts—are certainly not far-fetched, they represent something of an uphill climb. As I tried to illustrate with Lalitha’s story, several factors militate against such transmission. We are overwhelmingly surrounded by English in our day-to-day lives in the United States: the social media we consume, the conversations we have, and the books we read. 

To what extent should linguistic uniformity factor into marital decisions in the diaspora? The answer, of course, is subjective, and it depends on how highly ranked linguistic preservation is among an individual’s list of marital goals. 

The home, then, is something of a sanctuary for any non-English language sought to be transmitted; it acts as a bulwark against the sea of English that a young person encounters outside the home. The question naturally arises: what are the best ways for Indian American parents to pass on their native languages to their children? Weekend language schools (like Manabadi for Telugu or Hindi USA for Hindi) present one option, and they are advantageous in that they teach skills like reading, writing, and formal grammar that supplement verbal fluency acquired at home. 

The issue, however, remains this: can parents create an environment at home where their children can practice and sustain the skills they learn through these classes? Many can relate to the experience of learning a foreign language in school for years—Spanish or French, for instance—and faltering while speaking. In these instances, students usually have few avenues to practice the language outside the classroom. Parents who wish to transmit a language to their children should hold the line and ensure that they speak to one another in that language, thus provides a model for their children to emulate. They should also refuse to acquiesce to their children speaking in English at home. This sort of steely, unyielding determination on parents’ part can facilitate language transmission. Indeed, it is the immediate, and most obvious, solution to the language preservation question. 

In considering the long term preservation of Indian languages in the diaspora, however, a more vexing problem emerges. Let us, for a moment, return to Lalitha’s fictional story. Say her son, Pranav, picks up some Telugu and some Hindi from his parents. When Pranav grows older, he meets a romantic partner, Shyamala who speaks a different language—Tamil. The two end up getting married. What language do they communicate in? Likely English. The two are even further removed from India than their parents, for they are the grandchildrenof Indian immigrants. To the extent that they seek to transmit their respective languages to their children, Pranav and Shyamala face a dilemma: should they teach one or more of Hindi, Telugu, or Tamil? Teaching three languages is perhaps untenable, while choosing to teach some languages over others imperils those that were not selected. The issue here is clear: the more languages that are added to the mix, the more muddled transmission becomes. Even if language transmission is successful for one generation, continued transmission in succeeding generations is not guaranteed.

As I’ve previously explained, the American “melting pot” often involves the loss of ethnic identity while forging a uniquely American ideal, which I’ve termed the “American Übermensch.” So, it should surprise no one that language loss in the diaspora is part of this ethnic dissolution. Whether or not such language loss is inevitable is an open question. But it is evident that one of the most effective methods to forestall language loss is linguistic endogamy—that is, for speakers of one language to choose partners who speak the same language. This proposition forays into very sensitive territory, namely marriage and the family. 

In the American framework, marriage is a deeply individual choice, and so any didactic commentary regarding endogamy is something of an affront to this core principle of individual liberty. Indeed, the onus is principally on the individual to find and select a marital partner. From the eighth-grade dance to prom at the end of high school to parties in college, American society has created numerous built-in opportunities for young people to get comfortable in quasi-romantic settings. Put differently, asking someone out in college shouldn’t be a big deal when you’ve had practice with it since middle school. This sort of “romantic training” is necessary when American society effectively expects an individual to find their own marital partner at the appropriate juncture. 

 Compare this approach with the Indian system of arranged marriage. Though the prospective spouses themselves play a role in creating the union, their families also have significant input. From searching for suitable candidates to arranging meet-ups between the spouses-to-be and their parents, the family’s role in the arranged marriage process cannot be understated. I’ve noted that arranged marriage is, in some sense, like genetic modification—in searching for a suitable partner, one “selects” for desirable traits that they wish to pass on to future generations. (Language can be one of these traits. 

In fact, a 2018 study of East Asians in the United States found that “ethnic language [knowledge] significantly increases the likelihood of endogamy of each group of East Asian men and women.”) Admittedly, this is a somewhat crude characterization, for it obscures the emotional connection that should underlie any marital union, arranged or otherwise. And it is not as if marriages that are not arranged lack an element of this “realpolitik.” Earlier this year, CNBC reported the findings of one recent survey of American adults, where “60% report[ed] that compatibility, specifically practical alignment around money, matters more than chemistry in today’s economy.” Clearly, both arranged and non-arranged marriages involve a mix of emotional compatibility and practical considerations, though the weight accorded to each factor may diverge. 

To what extent, then, should linguistic uniformity factor into marital decisions in the diaspora? The answer, of course, is subjective, and it depends on how highly ranked linguistic preservation is among an individual’s list of marital goals. Linguistic uniformity may occur by mere happenstance: someone may end up marrying a family friend who speaks the same language as them, even if language itself was not a major consideration in that decision. When dating and finding one’s own partner is the norm in America today, though, selecting for linguistic uniformity requires significant intention and effort. 

For instance, one cannot filter for a Telugu or Tamil speaker on dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. Likewise, while searching for a partner, few would say, “I’d absolutely like someone who speaks my native language.” Indeed, American dating is not parochial in this way, by design. Rather, it is wide open and entails endless possibilities. It exemplifies the saying, “The world is my oyster.” Why would the average Indian American college student limit themselves to dating people that onlyspeak their native language? It seems a bit absurd to imagine. And, in the American context, dating is often the on ramp to marriage. It seems unreasonable that someone would date without considering linguistic uniformity, only to pull the plug down the line (in the absence of major incompatibility otherwise) on this account.

With all that said, there may be some in the diaspora who—through the arranged marriage process, or through linguistically curated dating—choose to maintain linguistic endogamy. Those couples, on average, likely have a better shot at preserving their languages than couples who are not linguistically endogamous. But for those young Indian Americans who are mulling marriage and care about preserving their native language, it is perhaps worth considering the benefits of a partner who speaks the same language. Is that necessarily everyone’s cup of tea? Certainly not. There may indeed be many who find a wonderful and otherwise compatible partner who speaks a different language. And to them, I offer my congratulations and best wishes. 

Ultimately, I wish only for culture-conscious diaspora youth to consider the language factor as part of their decision-making calculus. Vamsee Juluri and C. Raghothama Rao put it brilliantly when they wrote, “[I]t is not easy to live without consequences for whatever we do, for good or bad. It is not easy to even know what the consequences might be. But, in the joy of love; the promise of commitment, duty and honor; the glimmers of the future we hope for; and the whispers of the past we have descended from, we can see things a little better if we reframe how we view our role as individuals and as members of a culture or family, our duty to our ancestors and to our children, and indeed, our understanding of life, freedom, and fate as it evolves between traditions and modernity, as it were.” 

Yes, marriage is a deeply personal choice, but it does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, marriage has profound implications that extend beyond the individual alone, of which those entering it should be cognizant. 

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Vivek Rallabandi was born and raised in New Jersey and graduated from Gettysburg College with majors in history and religious studies and a minor in public history. His interests include cultural criticism, Indian and American history, and Carnatic music.