We Never Stopped Speaking Tamil. So Why Does It Feel Like We Lost It?

(You’re Tamil, right? Then why don’t you speak Tamil?)

A relative asked me this once, half-joking, half-not. I laughed it off. But it stuck, because the honest answer is complicated — I do speak Tamil. I grew up on it. I just don’t always sound like I’m supposed to.

If you asked my grandmother to explain heritage language loss, here’s the version she’d understand: it’s when a family slowly stops passing down the language their elders grew up speaking, until the grandchildren can barely hold a conversation in it past the basics. Simple enough. What nobody warns you about is that it doesn’t always look like silence. Sometimes it looks exactly like me — still fluent, still singing along to every Rahman and Harris Jayaraj’s track, still very much “speaking Tamil” — and somehow still losing something anyway.

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The Language of KOLLYWOOD, Cartoon Network, and Everything In Between

I was born in 2004 — technically a little late to the golden AR Rahman era, but try telling that to a kid who knew every Harris Jayaraj hook before she understood a single lyric in it. Tamil, for me, was never homework. It was Kollywood humming in the background at home, my amma singing half a line and trusting the room to finish it, a movie dialogue three generations could quote without even trying.

English snuck in through a completely different door: Disney, Cartoon Network, Marvel. Not “the serious language,” not “the school language” — just the one that came with cartoons and superheroes and the shows I actually begged to watch. So by the time I was old enough to notice any of this, my brain had already filed the two languages under totally different folders: Tamil was music and belonging, English was imagination and fun. Neither one outranked the other. They were just doing completely different jobs — which is exactly why it took me years to notice one of them was quietly losing ground.

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What Nobody Warns You About Losing a Language

Here’s the twist nobody prepares you for: losing your heritage doesn’t require losing your vocabulary. I can hold a full conversation in Tamil, no subtitles needed. What’s actually thinning out is everything around the language — the confidence, the traditional dress, the small cultural muscle-memory that’s supposed to come bundled with it, free of charge.

My aunt once looked me up and down and asked, “Dhanika, London le irundhu vandhuruku ” — “did you just fly in from London?” — because I dress Western, skip the bindi, and only touch traditional Tamil clothes when there’s genuinely no way around it. She said it laughing. I laughed too, on reflex. But sit with that comment for a second: she didn’t say you don’t speak Tamil enough. She said, in her own way, you don’t look like you belong to it. That’s heritage language loss wearing a completely different outfit — literally. It doesn’t always arrive as silence. Sometimes it arrives as someone quietly auditing how “Tamil” you still look, using a checklist that has nothing to do with the language itself.

The Quiet Part Nobody Says Out Loud: We Do It To Ourselves

Here’s the factor that gets me more than any policy on a slide deck: it’s not outsiders pushing Tamil out. It’s us. At school, in public, even in a room full of Indian people — teachers included — the default snaps to English, even when every single person there is completely fluent in Tamil. Nobody’s forced. Nobody’s told to. It’s just quietly, invisibly treated as the more “proper” choice, the one that sounds smarter, more decent, more put-together. Tamil gets rationed out for home, for jokes, for song lyrics. English gets used the second something needs to sound serious.

That’s not an accident, and it’s not neutral either. That’s perceived prestige — one of the exact factors driving language shift across Malaysia — working so smoothly that nobody in the room even registers it as a choice. It just looks like manners.

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The Branch That Never Got the Chance to Fade Slowly

My dad is Malaysian Ceylonese. His branch didn’t lose the language gradually, the way mine is losing it now — it lost it all at once, in the cruelest way possible. His parents passed away while he was still young, before they could hand down anything beyond the basics. So he grew up with plain, everyday Tamil, mixed early and often with English and Malay, and that’s the exact version that landed in my lap. Nobody chose to let it thin out. There was simply nobody left standing to pass down anything more.

That’s the part heritage-loss checklists never account for: sometimes it’s not habit, convenience, or prestige at all. Sometimes the thread just snaps, and the next generation is left holding whatever was left in their hands.

So, Genuinely — What Language Do You Speak With Your Grandparents?

Not the Instagram caption version. The real, messy, code switched one. Does it even match what you’d want to speak to your own kids one day, or has that quietly changed too without you noticing? Drop it in the comments.

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