Saving mother tongue mustbegin before schooling, at home.A minor policy twitch in early childhood education under NEP 2020 mayrejuvenate mother tongue and save it from going extinct
Dr. Ashraf Zainabi
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 rightly places strong emphasis on mother-tongue–based education in the early years. It recognises that children learn best when foundational concepts are introduced in their home (mother) language, and it encourages the use of regional languages as media of instruction at the primary level. Yet, several years into the policy’s implementation, a serious and largely unaddressed gap has become visible. While NEP 2020 speaks extensively about mother tongues inside classrooms, it remains silent on a more basic question, do children entering those classrooms actually speak their mother tongues at all?
Across India, a growing number of children begin formal schooling with little or no spoken familiarity with the language that is officially described as their “home language”. This is not a marginal issue limited to urban elites. It cuts across regions, social classes, and school types. The result is a structural contradiction. The policy assumes a linguistic foundation that is increasingly absent in reality.
This disconnect exposes a loophole in India’s early education framework, one that no amount of curricular reform alone can fix.
A mother tongue is not first learned in school. It is acquired naturally in the first five or six years of life, through everyday interaction with parents, grandparents, siblings, and caregivers. Linguists and early-childhood educators agree that this period is decisive. By the time a child enters Grade 1, spoken language competence is already formed, or already lost. Schools can teach reading, writing, and grammar, but they cannot recreate the lived linguistic environment that should have existed at home.
NEP 2020 acknowledges the importance of early childhood care and education, but it does not address the steady retreat of Indian languages from domestic spaces. As a result, schools are increasingly expected to teach in a “mother tongue” that many students barely understand. This places teachers in an impossible position and turns mother-tongue education into a symbolic exercise rather than a meaningful pedagogical practice.
The problem is not lack of policy intent. It is a mismatch between how languages actually survive and how language policy is currently designed. For decades, India has relied on soft measures to protect its languages, optional language subjects, awareness campaigns, cultural festivals, and institutional recognition. These efforts have value, but they have not altered parental behaviour. Families continue to shift away from mother tongues at home, often in the belief that early exposure to English or other dominant languages offers better social and economic outcomes.
This belief, while widespread, is not supported by evidence. Research consistently shows that children with strong foundations in their first language acquire additional languages more effectively. Cognitive development, comprehension skills, and emotional confidence are strengthened, not weakened, by early mother-tongue fluency. The fear surrounding Indian languages is not educational; it is aspirational.
Still, aspiration shapes behaviour. Parents respond not to advice, but to necessity. Languages thrive when they are required, and decline when they are optional. English expanded in India because access to education and employment depended on it. Hindi spread in many regions because it became administratively necessary. By contrast, many Indian languages such as Kashmiri have weakened precisely because nothing tangible depends in knowing them.This is the policy reality that NEP 2020 does not confront directly.
If the objective of the policy is to strengthen multilingualism, then the starting point must be corrected. Mother-tongue education cannot succeed unless children enter school already speaking the language. This requires shifting attention from classrooms to early childhood, and from institutions to households. To realize this, a minor policy shift is required.The most effective and honest policy lever available is school admission.
“The survival of Indian languages depends on transitioning them from mere “ceremonial symbols” in policy to active tools of daily communication. While the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides a framework, the author argues that true preservation must start at home and within the family before formal schooling begins. To succeed, the system must move beyond sentimental value and build structural responsibility into the language preservation process.”
School entry is one of the few moments where society legitimately sets non-negotiable conditions in the collective interest. Age criteria, vaccination records, documentation, and residency proofs are routinely required, and rightly so. Language, when it is the indigenous mother tongue of a region, is no less legitimate a condition.
A serious policy correction would therefore require that basic spoken proficiency in the regional mother tongue be made a prerequisite for school admission, in both government and private institutions. This requirement need not involve formal testing or literacy. A simple oral interaction is sufficient to establish familiarity. The purpose is not evaluation, but responsibility.Such a measure directly addresses the NEP 2020 loophole. It ensures that mother-tongue instruction in schools rests on an actual linguistic foundation, rather than on an assumption that no longer holds.
Concerns about exclusion are often raised in response to such proposals. These concerns deserve attention, but they should not be overstated. No child is being denied education arbitrarily. Parents are simply expected their wards pass in a language test they already possess. The requirement applies uniformly within each linguistic region and does not discriminate between communities. The right to education does not include the right to abandon linguistic responsibility altogether.
Parental choice is important, but it cannot be absolute when its cumulative effect erodes a shared cultural resource. Mother tongues are not private preferences; they are public inheritances that carry local knowledge, social memory, and cultural continuity. When individual choices collectively threaten them, state intervention becomes not only legitimate, but necessary.
Importantly, this approach does not oppose English, Hindi, or any other language. Multilingualism remains a national strength. However, multilingualism without a strong first language produces linguistic insecurity rather than global competence. Children who do not speak any language fully are disadvantaged, not empowered.
The constitutional framework already supports such an approach. India’s languages are recognised under the Eighth Schedule, and the state has a clear obligation to protect them. Education being a concurrent subject allows both the Union and states to design admission norms aligned with regional linguistic realities. Protecting languages is not merely a cultural gesture; it is a constitutional responsibility.
The cost of continuing with the current gap is high. Languages do not disappear suddenly. They fade first from childhood, then from daily conversation, and finally into archives. Once a language stops being spoken by children, revival becomes extremely difficult, regardless of funding or institutional effort.
NEP 2020 has opened an important door by reaffirming the value of mother tongues. What remains is to close the gap between policy vision and social practice. Without addressing early childhood language transmission, mother-tongue education will remain well-intentioned but ineffective.
Tailpiece: India must now decide whether its languages are to remain living tools of communication or ceremonial symbols preserved in policy documents. Correcting this loophole would not require abandoning NEP 2020, but completing it.If Indian languages are to survive, the process must begin where language itself begins, before school, at home, and with responsibility built into the system rather than left to sentiment.
(The author is a teacher and a researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora of Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
