Teaching your child Hindi or Marathi when you live abroad

There is a moment most Indian families abroad recognise. You ask your four-year-old something in Hindi or Marathi. They understand perfectly — and answer in English.

It is not rebellion, and it is not too late. But it is a signal, and what happens over the next couple of years usually decides whether your child grows up speaking your language or only understanding it.

The short answer

Children abroad lose a home language quickly once school begins in the majority language, because that is where almost all their input and all their social reward comes from. Keeping it takes deliberate, everyday use at home — not lessons. The strongest reasons to bother are family and identity, and the thing to avoid most is making the language feel like a chore.

Understanding but not speaking

This is so common it has a name: receptive bilingualism. A child follows everything said to them in Marathi and replies in English.

It happens because speaking a language takes more than understanding it, and children are efficient. If English always works — with parents, at nursery, with friends — there is no reason to do the harder thing.

The fix is not pressure. It is making the home language genuinely useful: people to talk to who respond better in it, things they want that are easier to get in it, and stories and jokes they would miss otherwise.

What is actually at stake

It is worth being honest about the arguments.

Family connection is the strongest one. A child who cannot speak your language cannot really know grandparents who do not speak English. Not a formal relationship — the ordinary one, built from small talk, teasing and bedtime stories. Families lose that, and it is hard to recover later.

Identity matters too. Children growing up as a minority often feel caught between two places. Being able to speak the language tends to make them feel they belong to both, rather than fully to neither.

On brain benefits, be sceptical of big claims. You will see confident statements that bilingualism makes children smarter. The research is genuinely mixed and heavily debated. What is clear is the opposite worry is unfounded: learning Hindi or Marathi at home will not harm your child's English or their schoolwork — that fear is a myth. Teach it for the family and the identity; treat any cognitive bonus as a possible extra.

The window

Before about six or seven, children pick up a language from exposure, without grammar, and end up sounding native. After that it is still very possible, but it starts to look more like studying.

If your child is two or three, you are at the easiest moment you will ever have. If they are six or seven and mostly answering in English, you have not missed it — but it is worth being deliberate now rather than next year.

What works for families abroad

Choose a pattern and keep it. One parent, one language. Or one language at home and the other outside. The pattern matters much less than sticking to it.

Make grandparents weekly, not occasional. A regular video call where the only language is Hindi or Marathi is the single best motivator — a real relationship that depends on it. Fifteen minutes a week beats an hour once a month.

Record them, too. Ask grandparents to record stories, rhymes or just talking, on voice notes. Children abroad often hear the language from only two adults, and more voices make it feel real rather than private to the house.

Find other families. A child who hears the language only from parents concludes it is a parent thing. One or two families with children the same age changes that, and weekend community classes help for the same reason — less for the teaching than for the other children.

Use screens in the language on purpose. If there will be screen time anyway, some of it in Hindi or Marathi is free exposure — songs, cartoons, an app that says letters and numbers aloud in the language.

Plan trips so they have to use it. A few weeks in India with cousins who do not speak English does more in a month than a year of weekly classes.

When your child answers in English

Do not correct, do not shame, and do not pretend you did not understand — children see through that and it makes the language a battleground.

Just continue in your language, and quietly repeat what they said in it: "हाँ, तुमने स्कूल में क्या किया?" They hear the version they could have used, without a lesson. Over months this works. Over a single conversation it will not, so do not test it that way.

Be realistic about reading and writing

Speaking and understanding come first. Reading Devanagari is a separate project, and plenty of fluent speakers abroad never learn it.

If you want it, treat it as a bonus rather than a requirement, and start only once speaking is comfortable — around five or six. Learn the Hindi Varnamala or the Marathi Barakhadi by sound and structure rather than as a list to recite, and keep sessions short.

If you are not fluent yourself

Many parents abroad are more comfortable in English than in the language they want to pass on, especially in mixed-language families.

Use what you have. Rhymes, counting, food words, greetings and the names for family members are worth a lot even without full fluency. Let your child hear fluent speakers wherever you can find them — grandparents, recordings, songs, an app that pronounces each letter and number properly — rather than giving up because your own grammar is rusty.

And say nothing self-deprecating about your accent or your vocabulary in front of your child. Whatever you teach them, do not teach them that the language is something to apologise for.

For a comparison of classes, tutors and apps, see what actually works abroad — and how the three languages are taught in the app.