It was interesting. Most of the folks there had been in America for a couple dozen years and the burning topic was that their children didn't speak Tamil. There were several fond hopes and questions combined in that statement. Several people thought that children's choice of language was determined by their peer group and that there was no way they would speak Tamil when all their peers spoke English. There were others who claimed that they had insisted on speaking only Tamil to their kids and that it had worked. Each speaker pointed to his own children as an example, whether of the peer theory or of the Tamil-insistence theory. A girl who'd grown up in America got into the fact, talking in Tamil, that if she'd managed it, others could too.
The funny thing was this. Tamil is a dichotomous language. The spoken or vernacular form is very different (and much less polite) than the written form. As if you and I spoke English the way we normally do but write it using "thou", "spake" and "thine". These folks were struggling to speak using the written forms and naturally, they were pretty rusty at it.
The written form does sound more poetic when spoken. But there is a reason that people over time evolved a less formal spoken form. I couldn't help but wonder why these intelligent people would choose to use a language they were really not comfortable in. Their children, for the most part, had refused.
