Tongue twisters.

I'd popped in to see my friend, Anne-Marie, for a few minutes of chatter and laughter while she was doing housework. But her four-year-old was bent, it seemed, on interrupting any conversation between us. As soon as we started talking, 'Mom, when you went to the shop this morning, did you have to cross the road?' Anne-Marie turned to her patiently, despite pulling a face suitable to a ridiculous question, 'No, I went to Madame Labutik's.' Her daughter was satisfied. No sooner had we started up again than, 'Mom, when I go to school next year, will I have to take a bag?' Anne-Marie, slightly less patiently, 'Of course, of course!'

I noticed her daughter was testing a new and difficult grammatical structure. She was generating questions about conditionality--'When x does y, does x have to do z?'--and checking to see if the constructions registered accurately with her mother.

'And I was convinced she was doing it just to annoy me!' Anne-Marie put her head back and laughed at herself.

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When her daughter goes to primary school next year, the teachers will completely ignore her already highly developed linguistic skills in Mauritian Kreol. They will systematically repress any spoken Kreol in the classroom, and never ever use a word of written Kreol. God forbid! They will attempt to teach her everything from the very first year of primary school through the medium of two languages she doesn't know at all: English and French. Her cognitive development will be held back to the level of her painstaking formalistic learning of foreign language constructions. Pedagogues call this kind of language policy a 'violence', and say the damage done to children's learning when they are taught through unknown languages (usually colonial or elite languages) takes some seven years post-secondary school to repair. And of course the emotional and psychological damage is difficult to quantify.

Anne-Marie's daughter is not alone. The Government Census says 93.2 per cent of children usually speak Mauritian Kreol and/or Mauritian Bhojpuri at home. Both these mother tongues are stifled in schools and denied status as a medium. If anything, Bhojpuri is more repressed than Kreol.

So, as Anne-Marie and I watched her daughter, now speaking to herself as she drew little pictures, we continued to marvel at the human language capacity. We like marvelling when we meet for a chat. And then we thought maybe it's misleading to see language through the cliche that it is just a 'means of communication'. Anne-Marie's daughter obviously uses it as her means of thinking and of understanding. In fact, she wasn't communicating with her mother at all really, except to get on her nerves. With her two irritating questions, she was beginning to grapple with ideas of conditionality and causality, and to test them against the sophisticated concepts of past and future that she has already managed to embed quite naturally in her language. 'No wonder,' Anne-Marie said, hugging her daughter, 'no wonder 40 per cent of you will fail the primary school examination, if they destroy the learning process we've just witnessed in you!'

Our conversation meandered on. I'd had a visitor from abroad, a University Professor of Sociology, who had asked me the usual question, 'Is Kreol derived from French?' and when I hesitated, he added, 'Or English?' Anne-Marie and I laughed. We like laughing, too. At least the question is up one notch from the previous generation of questions, 'Is Kreol broken French?': Globalized prejudice dies hard, we decided. Even here, where it's against oneself. We took a few moments to swear at the Minister of Education for perpetuating it.

Strange, we concluded, that for 40 years the linguistics departments of universities have known how the 80 to 100 Creole languages were born, and how they, unlike the other thousands of languages in the world that all evolve gradually, emerged suddenly from a break with other languages. They were generated collectively by a single generation growing up after a holocaust-like slavery, from out of the language-making capacity that we humans are born with inside our own heads. And yet even professors of other subjects, who would perhaps hesitate to hazard an opinion on quantum mechanics or phenomenology if it weren't their subject, are oblivious to their own ignorance on human language studies.

'The walls at universities must be as thick as ...' I began.

'Mom, when Pierrot goes swimming, does he have to ...' And we all three laughed together while she completed her question.

Lindsey Collen is a Mauritian novelist.

A child's questions stir larger thoughts on the politics of language in Lindsey Collen.