Keralite reveals being punished for speaking mother tongue in school: Viral Reddit post shares story of 30-year-old who lost his language in English-only system

School days often bring back warm memories - friends laughing in the playground, first crushes, and carefree recess chats. But what if those memories hide a quiet loss? Imagine growing up in your homeland, surrounded by its sounds, yet feeling like a stranger to its words. In places like Kerala, English-medium schools push hard for fluency in an international language. It's great for jobs and the world stage, but at what cost to the heart?

Keralite reveals a heartbreaking school norm to forget mother tongue

A 30-year-old from Kerala has gone viral with a painful truth: after 12 years at a Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) school, he's not fluent in Malayalam, his own mother tongue. Punished for speaking it, he pieced the language together from daily life, never learning to read or write it properly. His Reddit post and video have stirred massive buzz online.

In the emotional clip, he recalls: “I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) school in Kerala for all 12 years of my schooling. In all these 12 years, I was never taught my own mother tongue, my own language, Malayalam – not how to read it, not how to write it.

In fact, I remember this very clearly—in class 7, if we spoke in Malayalam in school, we were punished. We had to write a hundred times, ‘I will not speak in Malayalam’. Line after line, page after page, until the sentence stopped feeling like a punishment and started becoming a belief through repetition, till the language felt like something to be ashamed of, and I carry that."

He adds, “When you are separated from your mother tongue, you are not just losing words, you are losing a way of touching the world, a way of touching your soil.”

A lifetime gap in literature and belonging

Now, he can't fully understand gems from Malayalam writers: “I cannot open a Malayalam book and let it breathe into me. I still haven’t read Madhavikutty or Basheer or K.R. Meera in Malayalam. I cannot feel the weight of the sentence, the way it was meant to be felt. There’s a whole world of literature that exists beyond my reach, but written by my own people. It is close enough to recognise but far enough not to enter," he shares poignantly.

Standing outside his house without the key!

He further shares his grief: “I am standing outside a house that was always mine, but I do not have the key. Like hearing birds of your land but not knowing their names. Like watching the rain but not knowing the word for the smell of wet earth in your language. Like belonging to a place but not fully able to understand what it is saying back to you. You become a foreigner in your own land. And the grief and pain of this is severe because your mother tongue is the thread that connects you to the soil. It is the soul of the land."

He admits envying fluent peers and notes how some parents brag about kids skipping the mother tongue.

Social media reacts with shares, reasons, and solutions

Reactions poured in. A Reddit user wrote, “The whole system in some schools where they fine or punish students for speaking in Malayalam is the most redundant thing.” Another explained KV's CBSE two-language policy favours Hindi/English over regional tongues like Malayalam or Marathi.

Many pointed fingers at parents: “It’s the parent’s fault, simply. They could’ve taught him Malayalam at home," one wrote. “My kid goes to a German school. We speak Malayalam at home. She is learning to write Malayalam also. So I would say it is a choice," shared another.