When I was a child, we had a ritual at the end of every meal. Tack för maten, we would each intone, as we licked our cutlery and placed it on our plates. Varsågod, my mother would say, as she slammed down the fruit bowl. My mother hated cooking, so she couldn’t actually claim that it had been a pleasure, or that we were very welcome, as the phrase implies. The important thing was that we had thanked her for the food, as instructed, and in the language instructed. Her children might be irritating, but at least they were reasonably polite.

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I thought of this after watching the usual doom unfold on the nightly news last Wednesday, when a clip popped up of toddlers – not politicians, actual toddlers – listening to nursery rhymes as they wriggled in their parents’ laps. As they listened, their parents were singing along in Yoruba. Children born to Nigerians in this country, and who had only ever spoken English, were happily singing in Yoruba. As I watched, I felt like joining in.

I can’t sing in Yoruba, of course. I can barely sing in English, and a few years ago I had the excruciating experience of having to sing Swedish folk songs at regular intervals through an evening meal. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the sheets of paper next to the plates. I was in Sweden with my mother. My aunt had invited the neighbours round for dinner. Between courses, there was a custom my mother had forgotten to mention. Let’s just say that it doesn’t improve the taste of the food to sing in a language you can’t speak.

When my parents met, on a hill in Heidelberg, they didn’t speak each other’s language. The love letters they wrote, after they parted, were in German. The telegram my father sent was in English. “Will you marry me?” it said. Her telegram back was also in English: “Yes!”

My mother learned English. My father learned Swedish. Soon, she was fluent in English, German and Italian as well as Swedish, very good at French, and with a basic command of Thai (they lived in Bangkok for a while). My father, who had a first in classics at Cambridge, soon spoke fluent Swedish, German and Italian, and some basic Thai. They were all set, clearly, to produce a family of internationalists, perhaps in the mould of the Cleggs. Except that they didn’t. We all grew up monoglot in Guildford.

Fashions come and go. When I was a child, the fashion was to “fit in”. Yes, we had the weird Christmas food (pickled herring, anyone? Red cabbage?) and the Sankta Lucia crown and the odd Swedish phrase, but not enough to lead to anything you could call a conversation. Summer holidays were spent in a rust-red cabin on the west coast of Sweden, but the trips to elderly relatives, the hours of nodding and smiling and not understanding a single word, were only made bearable because of the cakes.

And now my mother is dead, and I do not speak the language she spoke, and I feel I have lost not just my mother, but half my heritage, too. You can never understand a country if you don’t speak the language. Without my mother, I will only ever be a tourist in the country that moulded her, that shaped her thinking, and her politics, and mine.

“A lot of people coming to the UK didn’t want their children speaking in a funny accent,” Gbemisola Isimi of the Culture Tree centre in Peckham, told told BBC London, “so they abandoned the mother tongue. The younger generation, the second generation, realised that was a mistake. We want to have that connection to our roots.”

Well, amen to that. Or amin, as they apparently say in Yoruba. We need that richness more than ever, as we face the prospect of a political landscape dominated by Little Englanders literally screaming to turn the clock back. Yes, of course we should all speak English. Of course we should live and teach and worship in ways that respect the culture of this country and obey the laws of the land. But this is a culture in which, in London alone, voices sing in more than 300 languages. That’s the country my mother fell in love with, and the one I’d like to get back.

• Christina Patterson is the author of The Art of Not Falling Apart