Four-year-old Damien never sings séga tunes but when mommy doesn’t see, he sometimes whispers the lyrics into his friends’ ears. “It’s in Creole; it’s not allowed,” he explains, giggling in the way kids do when they are caught being naughty. There is a house rule in Damien’s family. The children are only allowed to speak French and English at home, never Creole.

It’s not uncommon, this refusal among local parents to teach their children their mother tongue. Instead, they serve them a Mauritian-accented almost-but-not-quite grammatically correct French. The result is a bunch of linguistically confused kids who grow up not being 100% fluent in any language at all. It’s tragic but what is sadder is the motives behind the decision. It’s not about giving the children a leg up in life by making sure that they learn French and English. If that was the only reason, just ensuring that they work hard in school would have been enough. The refusal is not practical, but emotional – an expression of linguistic self-hatred.

Ask these parents how their view their own language. Most of them will not be able to hide their disdain. “Creole is a vulgar language,” one parent offered as an explanation. Others will tell you that Creole is “unsophisticated” unlike, they argue, the European languages. At the root of the attitude lies a failure to see languages for what they really are: tools for communication, not status symbols. They fail to see that any effort to attach a label to a language is a social construction. That you can be vulgar, or sophisticated, in any language.

It’s not unique to Mauritius, this linguistic self-hatred. Most western countries actively encouraged minorities to feel ashamed of their languages just a few decades ago. It was a way of hiding racist attitudes at a time when open racism had gone out of fashion. It was no longer socially accepted to call someone a damned nigger monkey, but you could call him unsophisticated for having an additional language up his sleeve. In Hawaii, Creole-speaking children were denied access to schools on the basis of language, not race. According to historians, it was merely a strategy to keep white and non-whites separated. It was discrimination disguised as a language issue. Aboriginal children in Australia were made to feel ashamed of their language, as were Welsh kids in the UK and Finnish-speakers in the supposedly super-humanistic Sweden (they were beaten if they uttered a word in their mother tongue in school).

In most countries, the linguistic shame died and made room for pride but the self-hatred survived in Mauritius. The result are children like Damien, who say that Creole is a “funny” language. Why? “Because when speak it, the other children laugh,” he says. One day, his parents will have to tell Damien that the others laugh at him because he isn’t fully fluent in his own country’s language – and that he speaks French and English like a foreigner as well. They will have to tell him that he has been deprived of a mother tongue.

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