I am constantly surprised by how quickly young children learn things. For instance, how do they remember all those nursery rhymes and stories? Usually before I've even started Jack and the Beanstalk, Toddler has rattled off the first ten pages eager to get to the juicy bit: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, little children here I come!"

When I was quite small my dad must have thought the same because that was when it was decided that I should learn to read and write Urdu, which we spoke at home.

From then on we had daily home lessons though we tried to get out of them as much as we could. At school we had learned to read using the stultifying 'Peter and Jane' books, now we had to learn Urdu using an equally lacklustre book about an old man buying mangoes.

As 'reading time' approached we would develop all manner of life-threatening illnesses: "Oh no daddy, I can't do any work today, I have a very bad tummy ache in my thumb."

And if that didn't work there were tears, recriminations, threats, uneaten suppers, beatings and more tears.

All in all, the ritual served to leave its mark on me and I vowed that when I grew up and had children of my own, naturally I wanted the same for them.

Some people, however, can be so negative about language learning, saying that any language apart from English is not important and a waste of time. Are these people also advocating that we eat only one type of food? Of course we could survive on the plainest of diets but no man wants to live on bread alone. Well, not when there's chapatti, naan bread, ciabatta, French stick, croissant, bagels etc on the menu.

I suppose people are always suspicious when you speak a foreign language within earshot. Everything sounds like: "Do you see that horrible person with awful hair and bad skin standing over there? Let's rob them and kill them." (I know because I've listened to native Geordie speakers and wondered if that's what they were saying about me.)

Of course, it's only ignorance which leads to such misunderstanding. Once I read some marvellous advice on how to make friends in any country learn the word for 'beautiful' in every language. Then wherever you go you could point to the sky/baby/scenery and say schon, beau, khubsoorat, etc.

When it comes to learning your mother tongue (or in Toddler's case, his grandmother tongue), however, there is more to it than that.

If Toddler was bilingual he would impress his relations in Pakistan who think that us lot in Blighty are a bunch of coconuts - brown on the outside, white on the inside. And he would avoid sticky situations when talking to 'Auntie'. Particularly if he was grown up and the topic of conversation was the marriage of her charmless daughter. Imagine if he only knew the word "jee!" which means "yes!" Aargh!

Incidentally, like the Eskimos who have 17 words for snow, we have lots of words to describe our relations (especially if we have fallen out with them, ho ho). But seriously, the only people you would really call "auntie and uncle" are those with whom you have no relation at all.

Language truly is the dress of thought, as Samuel Johnson once said. So why dress our thoughts in cotton when we can have silk? No? Non? Nein? Naheen? Etc...

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.