(August 25, 2025) “Kudi football khedna chahndi hai?” — “The girl wants to play football?” Jess’s mother exclaims in Punjabi in the 2002 Gurinder Chadha directorial Bend It Like Beckham. For many South Asians abroad, that line struck a chord. It wasn’t just about Jess’s dream of playing football; it was about hearing Punjabi — the language of family arguments, of affection and scolding — on a big screen in Britain. For the second generation, growing up between two worlds, such moments mattered. They showed that the language spoken at home could exist in the public sphere too, stitched into a story that felt their own.
Because when a language travels, it carries more than just words. In homes from Kuala Lumpur to London to Kingston, familiar Indian phrases echo across far-flung lands, connecting generations to an ancestral soil they may never have seen. These mother tongues crossed oceans, endured indenture and assimilation, and still found ways to thrive wherever Indians settled.
Take the Bhojpuri-speaking migrants from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh who crossed the seas as indentured workers. In the Caribbean, their folk songs — laments of separation sung by women — became the soundtrack of plantation life. For the first generation, these verses were a way of remembering home. For their children and grandchildren, they became something more. Set to calypso and soca beats, Bhojpuri lyrics evolved into chutney music — a genre that turned ancestral longing into a vibrant cultural form. What began as songs of loss became, in the hands of the second generation, a celebration of belonging.
Across the diaspora, Indian languages have been shaped not only by where people moved, but by the generations that followed. For the first generation, language was about memory and survival. For the second, it became negotiation and reinvention — a way to reconcile the world inside their homes with the one outside. Whether through chutney in Trinidad, Punjabi jokes in British films, or Tamil rap in Singapore, the second generation has kept native languages alive by giving them new purpose, proving they are more than inheritance — they are identity.
From Indentured Labour to Global Migration
The global journey of Indian languages began in the 19th century on the decks of crowded ships. After the abolition of slavery, the British Empire turned to India for cheap labour, sending over 1.6 million indentured workers to sugar colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. These girmitiyas came from many regions – Hindi and Bhojpuri speakers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Tamils and Telugus from the south, Punjabis and others – each carrying their mother tongue in their head and heart. On plantations in Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, and South Africa, these languages became lifelines of community. Bhojpuri, for instance, “arrived in Mauritius with Indian labourers post-1835” and quickly became the lingua franca of the sugar estates. By 1861, indentured Indians formed two-thirds of Mauritius’s population, and their Bhojpuri speech mixed with local Creole words, evolving into a unique island dialect.
In the Caribbean, Indian languages mixed and adapted. Migrants brought Bhojpuri, Tamil, and other tongues, which over time blended with English, African languages, and Creole to form unique Indo-Caribbean dialects. Even today in Trinidad or Guyana, you can hear traces of these languages in folk songs, wedding rituals, and everyday slang. Other streams of migration carried Gujarati traders to East Africa and Punjabi farmers to Canada and Britain. Wherever they settled, migrants built temples, gurdwaras, mosques, and community halls that also served as language schools. In Malaya and Singapore, Tamil merchants and laborers kept the language strong enough that Tamil is now an official language of Singapore. Every migration wave — whether through colonial labor, trade, or modern IT jobs — carried Indian words, lullabies, and proverbs in its suitcase.
Emotional Anchors: Heritage Language and Belonging
For those who left India, language was an emotional anchor — a piece of home carried across borders. Many immigrants held on to their mother tongue for comfort in unfamiliar places. Gujarati poet Sujata Bhatt, who moved to the US as a child, captured this struggle in her poem “Search for My Tongue.” She writes of the fear that a mother tongue might “rot and die” in one’s mouth, only to discover that, like a hardy plant, “every time I think I’ve forgotten… it blossoms out of my mouth.” Bhatt’s image of a mother tongue fading under a foreign one — then suddenly returning — reflects the diaspora’s experience: even after years of silence, a few familiar words can bring back childhood and heritage.
Tamil is one of the four official languages in Singapore.
Hearing one’s ancestral language can be “the fastest train to memory lane,” writes Sibani Ram, who grew up in the American Midwest. She found comfort in the Tamil her grandmother taught her. “Tamil was my blood, and it became the thing that helped me glue my identity back together,” she recalls. Old Tamil film songs could move her to tears, carrying her from Iowa back to India. For her, the language offered a “complete sense of identity” and a feeling of home. That is the power of a heritage tongue — it can collapse distance and time, linking diaspora Indians to kitchens, temples, and family stories they may know only through visits or memories shared across oceans.
Language is often the most personal inheritance in diaspora families. A Bhojpuri lullaby or a Tamil proverb from grandparents can carry the warmth of generations. Across the diaspora, mother tongues connect generations. They allow grandparents to share culture and values, and give grandchildren a sense of belonging. Even a few words spoken at the dinner table or during festivals can keep that link alive.
Lost in Translation: A Generational Divide
Yet, the farther from the immigrant generation, the weaker the link to language becomes. It’s a familiar pattern: the first generation speaks mostly their mother tongue, the second becomes bilingual, and by the third, fluency often shrinks to just a few phrases. Recent numbers reflect this. In the U.S., only 14 percent of Asian Americans born there can hold a conversation in their ancestral language. Among Indian Americans, just 3 in 10 say it’s “very important” for future generations to speak it. Much of this has to do with the pull of “fitting in.” At school and in public life, English dominates, and parents often switch to it at home, believing it will help their children succeed. As one Mauritian resident explained, “Even here parents do not speak to their children in Bhojpuri anymore. They think their children will be more successful at school if they speak Creole.” Over time, that shift — meant to help children adapt — chips away at the mother tongue.
The language gap between generations can be bittersweet. Older migrants often feel sad when their grandchildren can’t fully understand them, while younger ones may feel guilty for not knowing “their own” tongue. “Some were not taught their ancestral language, and there’s no shame in that. It doesn’t make you any less Indian,” writes Sibani Ram. Still, many sense something missing — family stories, prayers, or jokes that don’t translate.
Communities are working to close this gap. In diaspora hubs, heritage schools and Sunday classes have sprung up — from Punjabi lessons in UK gurdwaras to Tamil classes in New Jersey basements. Governments are also stepping in. In Singapore, where Tamil is an official language, minister Indranee Rajah urged families to introduce it early. “We need to ensure our children have opportunities to be constantly exposed to Tamil,” she said, calling the language a “passport” that connects Tamil people everywhere. A mother tongue, she reminded, isn’t something you just study for exams — it has to be used daily to stay alive. Her message resonates across the diaspora: stop speaking the language, and you risk losing not just words, but part of yourself.
New Voices: Reimagining Language in the Diaspora
A new generation of diaspora creatives is reclaiming Indian languages in fresh ways. On podcasts, YouTube, and Instagram, young Indians abroad are weaving their mother tongues into art, music, and media — sometimes even learning the language anew. Tamil-Swiss R&B singer Priya Ragu is one example. Growing up in St. Gallen, Switzerland, her refugee parents filled their home with Tamil film songs so she “didn’t forget where I was from.” As an artist, Priya began blending Tamil lyrics and folk rhythms into her sleek R&B tracks. “It just felt right,” she says. “We began using Tamil words in the songs. It’s the language that I speak. Why not put that into the songs that I create?” Making bilingual music, she found, helped her “reconnect with [her] culture on a deeper level.” Her debut mixtape, cheekily titled damnshestamil, announced her pride to the world. With praise from Rolling Stone India and the BBC, Priya shows how diaspora artists can turn what once set them apart into their strength.
It’s not just musicians. Young poets and spoken-word artists mix Gujarati or Punjabi lines into English performances to express the tension of living between cultures. Podcasts like “Talking to Grandma” share the stories of diaspora kids learning their grandparents’ language, turning that struggle into inspiration. On social media, skits about Indian parents speaking Hinglish or reels of teens singing Bengali songs for their elders are everywhere. These aren’t just for laughs or likes — they’re ways of keeping languages alive. By reimagining them as rap verses, memes, or punchlines, young people are giving their mother tongues new life in new places.
Across the diaspora, whether it’s Punjabi classes on Zoom or a Gujarati-language comedy night in New Jersey, the younger generation is finding purpose in learning and using their heritage languages.
Punjabi signboard in Canada
Carrying Language Across Borders
In the end, the story of Indian languages in the diaspora is one of love and resilience. Carried across oceans by indentured workers and traders, they survived in new lands, often against the odds. They became the lullabies sung in a Nairobi home, the secret spice in a Trinidadian curry, the Bollywood lyrics played at a Toronto wedding. These languages hold prayers and curses, stories and songs, kept alive by those who refused to forget. And even when forgetting happened — when children grew up unable to speak to their grandparents — the story didn’t stop there. Each time someone in the diaspora learns a few words, writes a line of poetry, or calls their paati in Chennai to say “love you” in Tamil, the language lives on.
“For those who do speak that language, don’t give it up to assimilate or fit in. It’s a part of you. Hug it, cherish it, love it, and speak it — and it will speak to you,” says Sibani Ram. In a world where much is lost in translation, holding on to a mother tongue is powerful. It shows that identity can be layered — that an Indian abroad can belong to their new country while still carrying the music of another language within. From the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean to the suburbs of New Jersey, the diaspora’s ties to Indian languages have taken many forms. They are not just words, but the way memories, prayers, and jokes are carried forward. And as long as families keep speaking them — even a little — these languages will find ways to survive, telling small stories of home in faraway places.
ALSO READ | Simit Bhagat: Preserving Bhojpuri folk music and popularising migration genre
