what's my mother-tongue?

As a kid i was confused as to what is my mother tongue. well, i was not worried about what's my mother tongue till I have to fill it out in a form. Then my confusion starts. Initially I was entering Kannada in the mother-tongue field (i guess during the hindi exam applications) (btw, though we're from TamilNadu, we speak kannada at home!). then when i was changing primary to high school, i filled it out as usual as kannada. the person-teacher who was scrutinizing the application took a good look at the appl, then looked at me and asked what's my mother tongue is. I answered promptly (had she asked it today, i'd answered can't u read?). she wasn't convinced. she asked do i know to read/write them..ha..here's the catch. I dont know to read/write kannada. (btw, all the conversation was going on in tamil, and not english. english was still a long a way for me, see the end of this post). she was of the opinion that i should enter Tamil in that field. Ofcourse, i never bothered to ask why et all. i promptly filled it up. from that point onwards till today, i've been filling out that field as Tamil.

so what's my mother tongue? wikipedia says - "First language (native language, mother tongue, or vernacular) is the language a person learns first. Correspondingly, the person is called a native speaker of the language. Usually a child learns the basics of their first language from their family."
it's perhaps more confusing now. I learnt both kannada and tamil from family for sure. perhaps i'm good at tamil more than kannada (hey, i've won inter-school competitions).
wikipedia also says : "One can have two (or more) native languages, thus being a native bilingual". Perhaps i fall into this category! but the applications seems to allow only one entry for that field huh..

so are you confused with your mother tongue?

coming back to that primary-high school transition, i faced a embarrassing moment there. i was studying in tamil(vernacular) medium till 5th std. i applied for the english medium in this high school and it required my name to be written in both tamil and english. till that point, i rarely required to use my english name. infact, my english name was given to me by my hindi ji, as it had to be entered in the hindi exams application. and she happily gave me the english name 'veerabadran' (she had written even my hindi name like that). and i was happily using this name wherever i needed to. and then this person-teacher (why teachers always have to be female with big specs?) happened to be a english teacher also, and she was quick to catch that my tamil and english name dont match well. she asked who filled out the application. i was happy to announce that it was me. then she fired a salvo at me asking do i know to write my name in english. frankly, i was perplexed as to y she's mad at me. i've been using this name lately without any issues. then she made me to pronounce my name correctly and said that tamil name is fine while english one is wrong. She'd strike out the english one, and replace it with something else. she was also pretty upset that quality of the applicants have come down and i had no chance of clearing the entrance test. i'd be more worried because she wrote something there and but i didn't have enough time to read it. there my name would go without even knowing what is in it. i'd wait for couple of agonizing days for the list to come out, see my name in the list and jote it down and memorize it. phew! finally i learnt my english name.