Motherese

 Aai used to call me "Rupu". Look at the very nomenclature. An abbreviation of a Marathi term for silver. Both fair and lovely, right? Priceless, too. In every sense of the term `priceless'. What a wonderful value addition to a child's, especially a daughter's, vision!  

That is motherese for you. Psycho-linguistics may define it as a mother's gibberish language. For a child though, it is the lilting, iyrical, and ultimate gatepass to that magical world called chilhood. Equally worthy was Papa's pet name for me. He would always call me "Jayu", indirectly instilling in me the `never give up' attitude. Thus parents prepare us for a lifetime.

Motherese plays a central role in such a self imaging. As it is, neuro-linguistics and psycho-linguistics inform us that the first six years of a child's life are centrally important in a child's over all growth pattern, and especially in the baby's emotional well-being. The way hence a mother talks to the child defines-n-refines the small one in a big way.

Motherese, let me clarify, does not merely mean a mother imitating the baby's stutter stupidly. An adult may think that the child likes such syrupy sweet talk. Children, in fact, dislike it because subtly they feel you are not treating them with the respect they think they deserve. I remember how Kunal, my nephew, reacted with a stare full of utter surprise and total disbelief, when I suddently started a `cute' conversation, used as he was to a normal, regular adult like tone. In brief, our talk constructs the child's wor(l)ds. Hence the importance of motherese.

Motherese puts the child at ease, so to say. A mother sure corrects the child, his/her speech patterns, behaviour modes. Sure such pruning is needed, too, for an all round growth of the child. A mother, however, has a feather touch while she thus edits out the unwanted aspects in her baby's being. Hence the importance of motherese.

Why, the stories we heard at bedtime, the songs Aai would hum to-n-for us, the gentle scoldings we had to gulp down alongwith food, all these expressions-n-words that have " made" us, all these are forms of motherese. May linguists make what they will of the incomplete sentences, the repetitions, the range of vocabulary, the intonation ingrained in motherese. In real lived lives, however, the incomparable motherese makes the childrenese actually.

Let me end this discussion with a much debated character from "The Tempest" by Shakespeare. He is Caliban, the native, who wildly takes Prospero to task for "learning me your language". We know better though. That is what a mother does, too.  She hues a (wo)man from a savage, not very noble at that. "My profit on it" , a child, unlike Caliban, would have to agree, is I could comfortably live and sleep  with "sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not" so much so that "when I waked, I cried to dream again".

Signing off with a much loved song, a perfect example of Bollywood motherese,

"lalla lalla lori

dudh ki katori

dudh me batasha

munna kare tamasha"

pratima@motherese