Yeah, definitely. As long as it's actually the parents native tongue, or they're used to it so much it might as well be. Sometimes you get parents trying to raise their children in a language they speak imperfectly themselves, and I have my doubts about that, I must say.

Oh, okay. It's possible I'm confusing the past with the present, or the political with the every-day language use - the context in which I came across this was something about how back in the day when India became independent, the southern states strongly opposed attempts to make state governments communicate with each other and with the federal government in Hindi. So they went with English instead. But maybe that isn't the case anymore, and in any case I guess it doesn't say much about how ordinary people communicate.

I was just saying, you know, surely India will have far higher percentages of people speaking English than a country where English doesn't have any particular status, like China, or Indonesia.