The Words We’re Forgetting

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Things we take for granted — language, the ability to think

Earlier this year, Revati was visiting her native place. In the height of winter, everyone suggested they build a shekoti — a bonfire. Upon hearing that word, Revati’s eyes lit up like a child’s. She lived abroad, and the opportunity to hear the word shekoti — let alone use it in conversation — had been quietly erased from her life. She realised with much shock that this missed opportunity probably meant her children didn’t even know the word existed, simply because it had never been used around them.

As Revati relaxed into a chair, surrounded by her chirpy and noisy family, she participated with joy in all the chatter and laughed heartily at the anecdotes being told and re-told. But as she went to bed — very late — that night, she was still mulling over shekoti. Not the word itself, but all the waves of emotion that had since started swelling up in the ocean of her mind.

We take language for granted. Language, and all its beautiful words that help us communicate, connect with people, express our thoughts and feelings, place ourselves in the world. When we stop using our native language — and deliberately reach for another out of social compulsion or sheer convenience — we take a quiet step towards endangering our mother tongue. We don’t mean to. But we do it all the same.

Revati recalled seeing a news piece once — a woman who was the last known person to speak the language of her tribe. Just one person standing between a language and total silence. It had felt distant and sad at the time. That night, it felt a little closer.

Her thoughts raced to something she had observed around her — so many Indian parents making it a rule that only English is spoken at home, hoping this would give their children a head start at school. These same parents would switch naturally to their common language when talking to friends or guests, but the children were expected to stay in English. One mother openly declared that she had enrolled her child in a British International School specifically so that the child would grow up with an English accent. Not fluency. Not expression. Not a love of language. Just the accent.

There is something worth pausing on here, and it goes beyond personal choice.

Research consistently points to the fact that children who receive education in their mother tongue develop stronger cognitive skills, particularly in critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. Linguist Jim Cummins’ widely cited Interdependence Hypothesis takes this further — proficiency in the first language strengthens second language acquisition by transferring cognitive and academic skills. Language development, the theory demonstrates, is not competitive but interdependent: first and second language skills grow together, enhancing one another. In other words, the child who grows up rooted in their mother tongue does not fall behind — they actually have a stronger platform to learn every other language from. UNICEFTaylor & Francis Online

Think of it this way. When you think in your mother tongue, you are not just translating — you are feeling, associating, making connections that go right back to your earliest memories, your first understandings of the world. That depth of processing is simply not available to you in a language you acquired later, no matter how fluent you become. There is a reason we count in the language we grew up in. There is a reason we dream in it. There is a reason the words that come out first when we are startled or in pain or in love — are always in the mother tongue. Case in Point is Sachin Tendulkar’s famous phrase “Aaila..”.

The implications of letting that go quietly are larger than most of us realise.

Consider what happens at a community level. Across the 7,168 living languages in the world today, 43% are at risk of being endangered. A language dies every 40 days. At current rates, 90% of the world’s languages could disappear over the next hundred years. These are not just statistics. Each of those languages carried within it a way of seeing the world that no other language can replicate. Visual Capitalist

When a language dies, the culture it embodies often fades with it — traditional practices, folklore, and ways of life that are unique to that linguistic community. Oral histories frequently preserve local knowledge about environments, medicines, and social organisation. A published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that over 30% of the 7,400 languages in the world will no longer be spoken by the end of the century — and with them will go medicinal plant knowledge, ecological wisdom, and centuries of lived human understanding that was never written down, only spoken. In these regions, 75% of the medicinal uses for plants are known in only one language. When that language goes, that knowledge goes. There is no archive. There is no recovery. Amara + 2

This is not only an indigenous or tribal concern. It lives in our drawing rooms too.

There is a grandmother in a Chennai suburb who makes the most extraordinary rasam — the kind that clears your head when you have a cold and warms something in your chest that has nothing to do with temperature. She knows which leaves to add and at which point, how long to let it sit, what it should smell like before it is done. This knowledge lives entirely in her hands and in the Tamil words she uses to describe the process. Her grandchildren, who were raised speaking only English at home, cannot follow her when she explains it. The recipe will not survive her. Not because nobody cared — but because the language that carried it was let go, one generation at a time, quietly and without anyone noticing until it was too late.

This is how it happens. Not with a bang, but with a gradual, well-intentioned loosening of the thread.

There is also something to be said about what we lose emotionally when we stop speaking our mother tongue. Language is not just a communication tool — it is how we process what we feel. Anyone who has ever tried to describe grief or longing or the specific joy of a childhood memory in a second language knows how flat and approximate it feels. The Marathi word ओढ (odh) — a pull, a longing, a magnetic draw towards something or someone — has no true English equivalent. Neither does the Hindi आत्मीयता (aatmiyata), which means an intimacy of the soul, a closeness that is not just warmth but recognition. When we stop using these words, we don’t just stop saying them — we slowly stop being able to feel the precise, specific thing they describe.

Coming back to Revati, lying in bed that night.

She smiled as she recalled a small habit of hers — she had always written her grocery lists in Marathi. Her hand, her language, her list. It felt like a small act of loyalty. She decided to keep doing it. She felt a pang, though, when she realised she could not remember the last time she had read a Marathi book. Marathi literature is famous and celebrated for its deep and varied spectrum — it has produced stalwarts whose written works continue to inspire even today. She decided to buy some books. Marathi, and Hindi too.

The one thing she was sad about was that her children could not read or write Marathi — though they spoke it fluently, thanks to her firm decision to speak the language at home. The fear that haunts most multilingual parents — that children surrounded by many languages will become fluent in none — had been completely disproved in her household. Her children spoke Marathi fluently, were equally at ease in English, and were studying French, Spanish, and now Japanese. The languages did not compete. They compounded.

The shekoti crackled on that cold winter night and Revati sat by it with her family, warm and present. But something had shifted in her quietly. A word had reminded her of a responsibility she had not been fully keeping. Not dramatically, not catastrophically — just the way you might suddenly notice a plant in the corner of your house has been getting a little less water than it needs.

Language is a living thing. It needs to be spoken to survive. It needs to be passed on, told in stories, written in grocery lists, laughed in, cried in, dreamed in.

What is your shekoti? What is the word in your language that carries a world inside it — and when did you last say it out loud?

Start there. Share your word in the comments.