Whose tongue is it? Mother's or the father’s!!!

Whenever we speak of language the very first thing that we say or hear is mother tongue. This emphasis on mother is probably due to the fact that a child learns his or her first vocabulary from the mother. Also it is very natural for one to speak in their native tongue that they have grown up learning. In this day and age we mostly are able to speak multiple languages by the time we finish our schools and start working. That is because of the kind of evolution that we have gone through in the last decade and how communication all across the globe has changed. We now have someone sitting in a plush office in the South of India speaking to someone in Paris in fluent French or someone guiding a native Spanish speaking person through some technical help from a call center while he or she speaks a different language at home or as we say has a different mother tongue.
However, it was once thought that the race of the mother impacts how the language of the child develops. Take for instance in America it is often presumed that the Child of a black mother will have less developed linguistic skills than that of a white mother. However, in a recent research study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute evaluated the language used by black mothers with comparison to white mothers who had the same level of education and it was found that race had actually no part to play in the amount of vocabulary or language skills that a child develops.
One very important aspect of language development is definitely the socio-economic condition from where the child comes from. Mother’s education certainly has a great part to play how the language skill of a child develops. However, all across the globe if we look at the scenario, we will always find the children coming from lower socio-economic back grounds and lower education level having lower language skills. Why does this happen? Very simply put, the mother’s of the children coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds usually do not have the means to good education. As the child’s first tutor is the mother hence the child gets to learn as much as the mother can impart. This learning has no relation with the race of the mother at all. On the contrary children who are born of mixed races and of educated parents are able to speak more than one language at a time.
It all seems to boil down to the fact that education is the key to better linguistic skills and not which race the mother belongs to.
By: Madhuchanda Saxena