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Why Do Most Parents In West Not Teach Punjabi To Their Children?


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This question often comes in my mind as to what could be the reasons for not teaching Punjabi to children in

western countries. Answers from readers could shed some light on this. People talk about having katha in English at gurdwaras..

Why cannot our children understand , speak and write Punjabi. Why are some parents not doing their basic duty of passing on their

mother language to their children?

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Guest RavindaSingh

Probably cos of the western style of living, environment, society many factors tbh i mean im kinda in the same boat my panjabis not up to scratch but its understandable i think it comes down to whether its the home language as in whether u speak it at home but yeah i agree it is the parents duty to teach the kids there maa boli

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This question often comes in my mind as to what could be the reasons for not teaching Punjabi to children in

western countries. Answers from readers could shed some light on this. People talk about having katha in English at gurdwaras..

Why cannot our children understand , speak and write Punjabi. Why are some parents not doing their basic duty of passing on their

mother language to their children?

Some modern parents don't want to "pendufy" their children. Not my assessment of the situation but the impression I've gained from encountering such people. Frankly those kind of parents who are ashamed of their heritage and don't want their kids speaking Panjabi in their own home deserve nothing but contempt.

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From my observation I have seen that Punjabi parents who speak English with their children belong to two different categories.

1. Those parents who want to learn to speak English but cant. As a result their speak English with their children so in the process they feel they are learning how to speak English. Usually I have seen it is the mothers who do this. It is very common to see some desi mothers speaking tuti phuti angreji with their children, it gets embarrassing for the children after a while.

2. The second category of Punjabi parents are those who have become out right coconuts. They are brown people who think they have become Goras and have adopted the western lifestyle in all aspects. They want to speak, look and act like Goras. They will do all sorts of things to show how Gora they are like celebrate Christmas, wear blue contact lenses, turn their hair blond and what not. This category of people suffer from an inferiority complex. They are ashamed of themselves, so they pretend they are something they are not.

Whether it is category one or two, both need to realize the damage they are doing to their children. By not speaking Punjabi with them they are restricting their children's ability to communicate in Punjabi. It is always better to know more than one language. Most of Sikh literature is written in Punjabi. By not knowing Punjabi, one cannot read books written by so many great Sikh scholars or understand Katha from our Gurdwaras.

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Some modern parents don't want to "pendufy" their children. Not my assessment of the situation but the impression I've gained from encountering such people. Frankly those kind of parents who are ashamed of their heritage and don't want their kids speaking Panjabi in their own home deserve nothing but contempt.

These so called modern parents are doing a great disfavour on their offspring by not teaching them their mother language.

They are in fact them dumber and unaware of their great religion, Sikhism and their rich culture.

This is explained in the article below.

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.

http://www.nytimes.c...lingualism.html

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It could be that the parents themselves can't speak punjabi themselves let alone read&write punjabi because they've become so indulged in the english language. Its worrying that some families only speak english as its very important to be able to least speak&understand punjabi.

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It could be that the parents themselves can't speak punjabi themselves let alone read&write punjabi because they've become so indulged in the english language. Its worrying that some families only speak english as its very important to be able to least speak&understand punjabi.

There's the above aspect to this situation which I completely agree with. But there's also the other category of people who, as I've mentioned above, think if their children speak Panjabi it will put them at a disadvantage in life or some other reason which involves them being ashamed of their background.

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Westernised parents don't have the basic knowledge of Punjabi language, therefore what are they going to teach their children? Learning 2 languages is an advantage but when children are born into westernised families it becomes a disadvantage...

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Again, we seem to be assuming the only reason parents don't teach their children Panjabi is because the parents themselves do not speak the language.

I'm saying there are some people who make a conscious decision not to allow their children to learn the language because they consider it to be a waste of time simply because these parents have no respect for their culture and traditions, and they believe their children can allocate their time for more worthwhile activities.

A long time ago I saw a young couple at a wedding admonish their kids for speaking Panjabi. I couldn't believe my ears. The parents were visibly embarrassed and went red in the face. When this type of attitude has crept into the minsdet of the parents then what can the children do? The message is being sent out "Be ashamed of your language and suppress your culture when you're out in the world".

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