School-going children in Delhi are lucky in that they learn to speak Hindi, our national link language, just by being around. The learning of the mother tongue poses more a problem. Being the capital of the country, the city attracts people from all linguistic groups. School cannot, naturally, be expected to teach all regional languages.

Sanskrit is taught form Class V to VIII on a compulsory basis. Knowledge of the classical language naturally helps their understanding of the regional language and Hindi.

At the Vidyalaya, children from classes VI to VIII have to learn one regional language from among four- Guajarati, Bengali, Urdu and Tamil. Basically the idea behind the introduction of Guajarati, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu is to systematically familiarize a portion of our school population to aspects of life, culture and heritage through the medium of its language, rather than baffle the young minds with the linguistic intricacies of an unfamiliar language and script. The syllabus of third language thus differs, in its content as well as spirit, from that of Hindi and English.