PlainGeets

Last week, I was at the Alliance Française of Bangalore, sitting across from the directeur, talking about my latest initiative: the Journée Européenne des Langues (European Day of Languages) contest that I’m running with Ask Sétu. More than a few days have passed, and I’m still thinking about languages…not just European ones, but our own Indian story with languages too.

Languages have always been part of my life, even before I consciously chose to study one. I grew up hearing German. Not because anyone in my family spoke it, but because my father, who worked in Swiss and German MNCs, and my uncle, who worked first at Siemens and then at the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce, brought home colleagues who did. So while many of my peers in India had their first cultural references from America or the UK – for me, it was Europe. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, and even Sweden : these were the countries that shaped my early imagination of “the West.”

For the longest time, I thought I’d learn German. That seemed the natural choice, given the voices around me. But in college, when the time came, German wasn’t on the list. French was. And so French it was. If you’ve known me long enough (or caught me on one of my uncharacteristically social days), you’ve probably heard this story: one of my father’s Swiss colleagues once visited us, speaking French at the dinner table. At that point, I had already studied French for three years. You would think I’d manage a half-decent conversation. But no. I froze, mumbled a few hesitant lines, and wished the earth would swallow me. My father, with his characteristic mix of practicality and concern, promptly marched me off to the Alliance Française. That decision changed the course of my life.

French became more than a subject; it became an entry point into another way of seeing the world. But Europe wasn’t quite done testing my loyalties. During my master’s, I was offered a semester abroad to….you guess it! Germany! There it was again, the country that kept tugging at me, even though French had already claimed me. Of course, I went. While in Germany, I visited a friend in Bordeaux, and something clicked. Walking around the city, meeting her friends, talking with her family in my hesitant French, I knew that I wanted to do something with languages.

In fact, during my Master’s in FLE, I studied the concept of plurilingualism. It was one of those moments when theory and life align. The idea that you don’t live in neatly separated language compartments, but rather draw from all the languages you know to communicate and understand the world, resonated deeply with me. It explained why my childhood German, my classroom French, my daily English, and my Indian languages weren’t in competition—they were in conversation. That framework made me appreciate multilingualism not just as a skill, but as a lived reality.

The path was not complicated after that. I finished my master’s, completed my courses at the Alliance Française, and soon found myself on the other side of the classroom, teaching French at the Alliance Française of Pune. Looking back, the idea of being a bridge between cultures, between languages, between people, was instinctive. I didn’t articulate it back then, but it has been the quiet thread running through my career.

Fast forward a couple of decades: I’ve lived in France, taught French to hundreds of students, and tried in my own ways to connect India and Europe through language. My understanding of “the West” has shifted over time, grown more nuanced, less wide-eyed. And while I love the idea of the European Day of Languages (an entire day dedicated to celebrating multilingualism – what’s not to love?) it also makes me pause. Why don’t we have something like this in India?

We are, after all, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Yet, the recent official push has been more about celebrating one language. A positive move, in the sense of resisting the dominance of English, but what about the rest? What about the languages that slip quietly out of use, the ones children don’t inherit, the ones that exist only in fading scripts and the memories of older generations? A single-language celebration, while valuable in its own way, doesn’t capture the full richness of India’s linguistic landscape.

That’s why Journée Européenne des Langues resonates with me…not just as an educator, but as an Indian. It insists that languages aren’t competitors. They coexist. They enrich. They open doors. And they remind us that our identities are not either/or but often both/and.

As I launch the Journée Européenne des Langues contest this year with Ask Sétu, I can’t help but imagine what it would look like if we started a similar initiative for India. A “Day of Indian Languages” that doesn’t just highlight one but celebrates all – Kannada and Konkani, Maithili and Manipuri, Kashmiri and Kodava. A day when we take pride not only in the languages we speak but also in those we don’t, acknowledging the vastness of our collective linguistic heritage.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Or maybe it’s time. If Europe can celebrate its languages together, surely we in India, with our kaleidoscope of tongues, can do the same.

Until then, I’ll happily continue marking the European Day of Languages, both for what it represents and for the reminder it gives me: that languages are not just tools of communication, but also ways of belonging.