Awadhi: my mother tongue?

Hindi. Well, that’s the language I have always assumed to be my mother tongue until last evening when I asked myself whether it was really so. While my parents have conversed with me and my sister in Hindi at home and continue to do so even now, it was always understood, never questioned, that they spoke in `Awadhi’ with their parents and siblings, but never to us.
Here I would clarify that Awadhi is a different dialect from Bhojpuri and Bihari. The three dialects may have similarities, but they are very different from each other, a fact reiterated by my parents each time they would watch actors (usually playing servants in films or television serials) goof up on the dialect big time in their unsuccessful attempts to represent an eastern UP immigrant to Bombay.
It is strange that I have this newfound fondness for a dialect I never paid much attention to. As long as I was in Dehra Dun I would hear it at home all the time as Baba and my mother would talk to each other in the language. We were always encouraged to polish our Hindi and English but never asked to learn Awadhi. My sister and I didn’t even try.
Even now, each time my mom calls up her brothers in Gonda (a place in Uttar Pradesh) its never, “`kaise ho” but always “ka haal hai bhaiyaa”.
The sweetness of the dialect never registered because perhaps I was hearing people speak it very often as long as I was in Bombay. It could be my mother over the phone or the innumerable `bhaiyas’ in the city__ I was always in earshot range of Awadhi. But, no longer so.
The fact that I miss its presence in my day-to-day life suddenly struck me in office one day. There is some construction work happening on the floor where my cubicle is and one day I almost jerked I heard one of workers say, “ka bhaiya, kab tak kaam chali”. It was perhaps after many many months that I heard somebody speak in good Awadhi. And I loved it.
Last evening, it was while watching the extremely talented Ashish Vidyarthi perform his solo act in Nadira Babbar’s Dayashankar ki Diary, that I started pining for the language again. Vidyarthi, who plays Dayashankar, a boy from UP working as a lowly clerk in a government office and weaving dreams of marrying his bosses’ daughter, speaks in very UP-Hindi through the play. In the end when he takes a beating, both emotionally and physically, that he starts missing his mother, his motherland and breaks into perhaps the best Awadhi I have heard in a long time… “humka hiyan se le jaaon amma”, he cries out to his mother who lives in a village in UP.
After the play got over, Vidyarthis’ last lines kept haunting me. I realized that how I had enjoyed the last part the most__ not only because it was the most well enacted part but also because I connected with the language he spoke in.
That's when I asked myself whether Awadhi should technically be my mother tongue? But, can a dialect that I have never ever spoken in be my mother tongue?