I have arrived in Pondicherry and it has been about a week of being here. The journey here for me was hectic, from moving out from my apartment in Ann Arbor, to being the New Dehli airport the next day, to then get to Chennai the next, and then finally Pondicherry. There was so much uncertainty in the journey here, from being interrogated by immigrations, losing my SIM card, having my card not work at ATMs, etc. I was worried that my whole project would be a bust.

However, here I am having finished week 1. I sat in a café the other day and one individual said “Salut!” a French greeting to me. This Indian looking fellow of about 45 years and his group and I started a long conversation. 2 of were from West Bengal and 1 was from Odia. However, they had done their schooling in Pondicherry and were reconnecting after some time. One of them even got his Masters degree from the elite French institution SciencesPo. Given this, they were educated in English and French, and like many other Indians, spoke quite a bit of others (well, they each spoke Odia, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil to be exact). 

There are interesting remnants of French culture here in the city. We have street signs in Tamil and French, old buildings with French names, and people that are old enough to remember direct French rule. 

There have been other fun encounters with French, like with my Tamil lessons, my teacher remarked that her father only speaks French and Tamil. I ran into middle school aged children with backpacks embroidered with “Petit Secondaire” translating to middle school. Some men with men who work in the shops here. 

Now, French isn’t as common of a language as I was expecting, but to have encountered these individuals was really a blessing for me. The SciencesPo graduate was really interested in my project, and gave me contacts in the area of people to talk to. This gave me some hope, as cold emailing before I came was largely unsuccessful.

It’s surreal here to understand that many people here are multilingual. Most of my friends are multilingual, but the majority of the people I run into in Michigan aren’t. Even where I am from in Florida, I grew up in a bilingual Haitian Creole community, with Haitian Creole and English, but if you weren’t an immigrant or a child of immigrants, knowing anything other than English wasn’t common. That being said, however, there are many instances where the dialect of English is difficult for me to understand, and there’s also a number of people that simply don’t speak English. I am really curious about understanding this stratification of language knowledge. I will do my best to discuss and investigate the language space that exists in this enclave of Tamil culture.