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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

People in America really don't appreciate the blessing of having a single (nearly) uniformly spoken language. Being able to drop in anywhere in a country of 300+ million people and being able to converse with the locals (not just communicate, but convey your deepest thoughts)--it's a benefit the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.

This article touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately--the deepness of language. I think people have this vision of a polyglot future with automatic computer translation. I think that's quite short sighted and misses how deep language goes. My mom, who was born in Bangladesh, learned English in school and moved to the U.S. as an adult. Though she has been in the U.S. for thirty years, she will never be able to communicate in English with the level of sophistication she does in Bengali. Indeed, even we (her family who know better) perceive her as someone capable of a limited range of thinking as a result of the limited range of what she can express verbally in English.

All that resulted in quite a shock for us when she started using Facebook. On Facebook, she can sit and mull things over and think about what she wants to say. So we'll be taken aback by her posts quoting Dostoevsky or whatever (she was a voracious reader of classic literature translated into Bengali). It's a stark example how hobbling it can be to be forced to communicate in a language that is not one's own (an idea the article delves into). It also makes me skeptical of any idea that we can establish meaningful communications built on automated translation.

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There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in Richfield, Utah or Ermine, Kentucky and you find the same Lay's chips, the same Progresso or Campbell's soup, the same Colgate and Oral-B toothbrush, the same flatscreen TVs, the same video games. You pay with the same cash or card, you have the same return policy. When talking to people, you can talk about the same high-profile domestic sports teams, invoke recent pop culture events, or federal politics, and they'll have something to say.

There's swaths of the US that are far off the beaten path, but an overwhelming portion of the population is hooked into the same fabric of distribution of information and products. This is made easier, and is also perceived more readily, by a shared home language being the language of interchange.

> the same Lay's chips

It is far from clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug.

It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.

Americans used to ridicule people living in the Soviet Union because they had to buy the same sofa, the same car, the same beer, all manufactured by the state. They lived in the same apartments, stamped out by decree, from Europe to the Pacific.

Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated?

Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something even blander.

I think they meant that you can find Lay's everywhere, not that you can only find Lay's everywhere. There's a huge difference between those two things. I'd take that any day over Soviet Union.

It's this kind of bland ubiquity that is what the Soviet Union was all about.

I'm not saying the Soviet experience was great, but that the modern American experience of the same shit, the same stores, the same everything everywhere you go is bordering on absurd.

America is a handful of mergers away from having one cable company, one telephone company, one media company, one film production company.

That's not a good look.

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

I don’t find that scary at all - because in the gaps there’s a whole load of diversity.

The uniform experience of the US is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest "why would I travel elsewhere if I haven't even explored my own country?"

As if seeing some new sights is the only rewarding aspect of being somewhere new rather than experiencing something truly different in life, like different culture, language, and way of life.

Although an awful lot of this difference is due to poverty and shouldn't be romanticized. I was recently in Cambodia and the new thing there is that they've recently gotten smartphones. Yes, some of the people I was with bemoaned this fact as it meant that things were becoming "less authentic", but the thing is, due to the lack of computers, the smartphone revolution is also the Internet revolution there. It is an wonderful thing from the Cambodian perspective.

There is no senseless uniformity. It really makes complete sense when you look at it from a logistics prospective. Why have 5 regional factories making things slightly different when you can make one large factory and exploit the efficiencies of scale and the countries transportation networks.

The US has been pretty easy to cross since WWII. It is very easy for goods to travel through states. Europe, as a whole has not, though the formation of the EU has helped.

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification.

It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different.

Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that have resisted this overwhelming pressure to conform, they're all the same.

I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in. Where there's a sense of being somewhere and having history worth sharing.

There is still a lot of that out there (getting smaller though). For example if you aren't in the American South, don't expect to be able to order sweet tea in a restaurant -- instead, you will get iced tea and some packets of sugar (which isn't the same as putting sugar in when the tea is being made). Only recently have I seen sweet tea offered in some places.

I grew up in the midwest, however my mom is from the deep south. So I didn't realize that most people around here have never had (or heard of) a banana sandwich (made with banana, mayo, and white bread). And until recently, you couldn't get things like headache powder (Goody's, Stanback, BC). That was strictly a Southern thing.

The key is to ignore all of the giant signs and flashy advertising and look for the local brands. They're everywhere, even in Wal-Mart. Just look at the lower shelves.

Of course, this doesn't always work when you're in a place like Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Dallas, where the national brands are the local brands.

The problem is that when Wal-Mart shows up all the local businesses die but for the ones that sell stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't. That's usually just porn and adult toys with the occasional guns and/or liquor store.

Sweet tea is an interesting example actually, in that McDonalds made it available nationally 10 years ago.

There is a certain amount of culinary darwinism at play here, where the strongest regional foods have gone national over the last couple of decades. See also, Chipotle scaling the Mission burrito to thousands of stores.

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification

I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization.

The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable.

Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today, if you see the golden arches, you know exactly that the food will look like, taste like, and for the most part, cost.

This is also true on an international level. Even though there are regional items on McDonald's menus, when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia.

There's a name for it in diplomatic circles, but the term escapes me. Essentially, opening McDonald's restaurants in a new country introduces that country to supply chains, language, tastes, and other Western elements that help bridge the cultural gap between nations and brings a level of understanding to the masses that eventually leads to closer relations. It's the reason that when McDonald's first went into Europe, it used the slogan "The taste of America."

With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.

> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

> A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.

That's the first time I hear that correlation, and it's amazing. I could see that opening a McDonald's in NK would be symbolic, but not at that one-layer-deeper level. It's the kind of freakonomics insight I'll be able to drop at conversations for a long time!

> when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I'm an American currently living in Russia. McDonald's menu here is different. In fact, it's better and the ingredients are higher quality (which is quite ironic). Same for all American fast-food chains in Russia (and Europe, for that matter).

> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

And NATO and Yugoslavia, the US and Panama, Israel and Lebanon, and Russia and Ukraine. One could even argue Qatar and Saudi Arabia at this point.

Of course, it should be noted that the attitude of globalization preventing (major) war from breaking out isn't new--at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a quite common view that Europe was too economically intertwined for war to break out. Instead, three of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history broke out.

> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

Well, I went to do a research on that. It's called "The Golden Arches Theory"[1], it was meant to be tone-in-cheek, but to rationalize on the idea that two countries who develop a middle-class and economic stability to make a McDonald's viable no longer have an interest on going into war to each other.

Of course, there are many exceptions, both before, immediately and long after that "theory" was written:

- The 1989 United States invasion of Panama

- In 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir, known as the Kargil War. Both countries had (and continue to have) McDonald's restaurants.

- The 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, following hostilities ongoing since 1973, with South Lebanon occupied until May 2000. (McDonald's franchises were established in Israel and Lebanon in 1993 and 1998, respectively.) However, the Lebanese Armed Forces were not a party to the fighting, the Israel Defense Forces action being taken instead against the paramilitary group Hezbollah.

- The 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia.

- The 2014 Crimean crisis between Russia and Ukraine.

And even more amazing, there's an improved version of the theory:[2]

"The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

That is that, as long as corporations have major supply chain operations in countries other than that corporation's home country, those countries will never engage in armed conflicts. This is because of the economic interdependence between nations that arises when a large corporation (such as Dell) has supply chain operations in multiple global locations and when developing nations (in which supply chain operations commonly take place) are reluctant to give up their newfound wealth.

But I doubt that updated version wouldn't fall short to prevent the exceptions listed above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree#G...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Dell_theory_...

You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabulary and daily life are all different. Where there's a sense of place, and a distinct local identity and history.

It's perhaps possible that you and I are so wonderfully blessed as to already live in such a place!

I've had the experience of struggling to understand the local dialect. To work to absorb the local diction and vocabulary, to come to grips with local history and understand the local identity.

It's easy to see a Taco Bell, a Starbucks, and a cookie-cutter diner and decide every place is the same. To be sure, those very much are. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this is just a patina. What you and I and others seek and love is there, today, still. It lives and breathes and thrives. It just requires a token effort to look for.

> I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect.

It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.

I dunno, I kind of get the feeling indonesian democracy is in a healthier state than american democracy.

Based on what?

Based on what I know about Indonesian politics and American politics. I grew up in Indonesia for a while during the Soeharto regime, and have maintained an interest since.

then your feelings are mis-calibrated. They only have had free elections for 20 years! Aceh is practically a theocracy. Political violence is common. They just jailed under blasphemy laws the loser of of the governor's election in Jakarta.

but don't take my word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

US - at an embarrassing, miserable 21st place scoring 7.98.

Indonesia - 68th.

I bet it would be a different story if you took the direction of movement of the score.

Honestly I was thinking about the presidential politics rather than regional. Indonesia is a large and diverse country. Similar population to the USA and arguably more diverse.

Hell, we can barely democratically govern Louisiana. Not for nothing did A.J. Liebling dub it Lebanon.

> Hell, we can barely democratically govern Louisiana.

No disagreement from me on that. Inclusion of Louisiana, Alabama, etc., in the republic is a real challenge.

> This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification.

As someone hailing from an apparently more "heterogeneous" country than the USA, I gotta ask: Death of what?

Death of culture. Death of variety. Death of everything that made America an interesting place to visit.

Every city used to have its own local shops, brands, traditions, cultural events. Cleveland and Rochester were worlds apart despite being geographically close.

Now it's the same stores, the same malls, the same cookie-cutter McMansions. The only variety left is the color of the police cars and minor variations in the speed limit.

> I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in.

Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me:

In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi on my way to Pascagoula to go sailing for work. First time in America. In the morning, I wanted breakfast, and saw a Waffle House at a truck stop over the highway from the hotel. I knew them from films but I'd never been to one. I wandered in, and tried to order.

The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.

You might be able to get the same experience in a small town out back somewhere in Australia. Who knows. Try it :)

> The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.

As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world.

Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.

I remember ordering a burger in the South once and being asked "Do you want that all the way?" I, being from the Northern Midwest, had no idea what the waitress was asking. It turns out she was asking whether I wanted all the toppings (which in my dialect I would call "with the works") or with no or only a few toppings.

I want to challenge you on a few fronts.

1. Different parts of the US have vastly different values and cultural differences. Unless of course you want to compare SF, to rural Utah filled with devout Mormons, to the south side of Chicago, to Miami and say they're all the same.

2. The argument you're making is essentially against cosmopolitanism. I don't per say disagree, but it should be known that while you listed off the "fun" parts of a huge diversity of culture in one country you also run into the less fun when it comes to shared values on things like equality of the sexes, permissiveness of different sexual orientations and religions etc. Those very much so are also a huge part of cultural diversity.

There are pockets where there's cultural differences, but you really need to dig to hit the bedrock. Superficially there's almost no difference. The things that once made places like San Francisco unique and interesting are being destroyed by gentrification, and Utah itself is being gentrified just the same.

I'm not arguing against cosmopolitanism, but that's not what you think it is. That's where wildly different cultures can co-exist, side by side, and you can move seamlessly from one to another. Manhattan used to be a good example of this, but now it's getting extremely bland, with all the character being paved over by crushingly dull uniformity.

A lot of Americans think accepting diversity means allowing non-white people to act as if they were white, and this is where all this gentrification comes from. Yes, our condo is progressive because we don't discriminate. Anyone who can afford the cripplingly high costs are welcome to live there!

An interesting thing is that despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US, along many dimensions, based on what I've read in Wikipedia, for example, about regional US cuisines. The US might be a melting pot, but many of the ingredients in the pot are not quite melted - to coin a phrase :) - and I hope they stay that way.

More like a tossed salad!

Ha, great analogy :)

I think many tend to exaggerate the level of regional differences in America. Sure, there are some significant differences, but it's nowhere close to the level of difference of going to another country (except Canada).

For example, language wise, if someone was raised in the US, I probably can't tell at all where they're from, especially if they're younger and/or college educated. Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average.

I've lived in several regions in the US and never really got a feeling of being out of place or alien that I get sometimes visiting other countries.

Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average.

Then you haven't talked to many real locals when you travel.

When I talk to my relatives in New York City (real native New Yorkers, not imported midwest poser hipsters), my wife from another part of the country can't understand a word we say.

Siri is tuned to some California nuanced accent that means she can't understand my wife at all. I don't know how it understand people from Boston. (Again, real local people from Boston, not the imported flatlanders.)

A friend of mine from a major east coast city went through years of training to get rid of his accent. He says it was the key to becoming a success in the radio industry.

dude, your wife is exaggerating - excluding Gullah I don't think any range of American accents even approaches the mutual unintelligibility on that tiny island we seceded from. I've been from east to west in the US, downeast, new york, boston - these are no problem whatsoever for any Californian or Midwesterner.

despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US

This is true. The more you travel, the more you encounter this. Chili in Cincinnati is not even remotely the same at chili in Houston. (Key ingredients in Houston are meat, chili powder, and tomato paste. Key ingredients in Cincinnati are chocolate, allspice, cinnamon, spaghetti, and cheddar cheese.)

Breakfast meat in eastern Pennsylvania is scrapple. In New Jersey it's Taylor ham. In Kentucky it's sausage links. In Iowa, it's bacon.

Philadelphia area grocery stores (last time I checked) stock Campbell's Cream of Turtle Soup. That would be unheard of in the rest of the country.

There are a lot of people who sit on the internet and whine about how boring life is in America. Life in America is like most other countries — exactly as boring as you make it, or as exciting as you make it. And again, the more you travel, the more you see the diversity of the nation unfold.

I dunno. This is a topic I'm pretty passionate about. I'm extremely well-traveled within the US and have a lot of good friends from different states, and the tiny regional differences that you're mentioning are frustratingly bland compared to, say, the cultural differences between northern and southern France. And even there, the relentless pace of branded technology and products is increasing, to the point where in historic Aix-en-Provence, in a famously beautiful town square, there's an entire metallic-and-glass Apple store.

It pains me to see the same restaurants, architecture, road signs, vehicles, etc- because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different. Houston, where I live, is a desert of strip malls, and the only reason you can tell it's Texas is because it's hot and sunny. Take away the sky and I could be in the same parking lot in any state in the US.

Going to the "historic" neighborhoods of cities or the national/state parks and wilderness areas are really the only way to truly get a feel for the vastness and diversity of the US, and it didn't use to be that way.

>because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different.

Welcome to the modern world. This will eventually happen everywhere. It's easy for places to be different when they were separated by days or weeks of travel time. Now ideas can be transferred in seconds and the entire US can be traversed in days. Regional factories used to supply the area around them. Now one part made in China can be supplied anywhere on the planet.

The past was like the past because of logistics. The future is looking much different.

Conversely, technology also allows similar people to refine their ideas about what makes them similar. Cultures will maintain their separate ideas and market strategies as long as there are enough people to pay for them. After all, Walmart is struggling in other markets as varied as China and Canada, because their model doesn't adapt very well outside the US. Likewise, visiting a KFC in China is actually very different from visiting a KFC in the US.

> religion

There's not a lot of shared religion in the US, other than growing secularism. Agnosticism, last I saw, was the fastest growing belief. When Americans were more religious, there was a lot of conflict over that.

> Being able to drop in anywhere in a country of 300+ million people and being able to converse with the locals (not just communicate, but convey your deepest thoughts)--it's a benefit the vast majority of people in the world simply do not have.

Weird how I never really noticed that. The US does have its fair share of local dialects, but they are usually still very easy to understand, even for non-native English speakers. It's one of the reasons why I prefer US English to British English, with some British dialects I have a really hard time understanding what's being said.

Do Brits struggle with understanding some British dialects? As a native German speaker, I know for a fact that some German dialects just sound like incomprehensible gibberish to me.

Which is extra funny when you run into these kinds of dialects near big US military installations, like Grafenwöhr, where the locals speak with an extremely thick upper palatinate dialect.

Must be really confusing for any of the US servicemembers stationed there who are trying to learn German, trying to understand German that not even most Germans would be able to understand.

I see a lot of non-native English speakers speaking English to each other because it’s a common language they all know. It’s not the same as what you’re describing, but it gets people a lot of the way there (my observation is based largely on Europeans and South Americans but others too, basically anywhere where English is commonly learned)

Isn't Mandarin Chinese understood on all China, from Xinjiang to Canton?

Mandarin is about as pervasive in China as English is in Europe. The USA is definitely more linguistically homogeneous.

Depends on the area. You'll find speakers of lots of foreign languages all over in NYC or coastal California.

What might be unusual in the US though is that it's a big country in both population and geographic size, and yet the amount of regional variation in the primary tongue is quite limited. I think the UK and Germany have considerably more variation, even though they're smaller countries.

Written, mostly, but spoken, not so much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

Well, isn't it a wonder more than a billion people can understand each other's writings even if they speak different dialects. To some extent, a Chinese and a Japanese can communicate with Hanzi/Kanji even if they don't understand the other language.

Yes, but it exists alongside other dialects spoken locally which are sort of mutually intelligible, but in some cases only when written (cf. Cantonese).

It's analogous to large parts of the US outside the Northeast Corridor using various dialects of American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English, but only among people from their home city, and also having varying degrees of command over spoken English.

> American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English

ASL is an utterly different language from English. Your sentence is equivalent to saying that because a person speaks Cantonese but writes English, Cantonese is the same as English.

"English can be represented through fingerspelling or artificial systems like Signed Exact English or Cued Speech. But these are codes for spoken or written language, not languages themselves." from http://mentalfloss.com/article/13107/7-things-you-should-kno...

It is a common misconception, because English speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL.

Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.

Glad you asked, as this article reminded me of that. Outside of Northern China, where Mandarin is original dialect, the answer is no, Mandarin is not understood throughout the country on a level that English is in the US.

It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except for the North where it's from.

The frequency of overhearing people asking each other for more clarification showed me that language barriers existed, even among university students. English by contrast is much more consistent and far less ambiguous among accents and dialects across the globe.

At first when people complimented me on my English, I didn't really understand why until I realized most Chinese are not fluent in Mandarin in the way I am fluent in English. It seemed they thought the same fluency disparity would exist among US natives with English.

I experienced the same in India a few month ago, when I traveled the length of the west coast with an Indian friend of mine. Coming from the US, I never appreciated how diverse the country is, especially with language. In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.

It blew my mind a little bit, especially realizing the administrative nightmare it must be to run a country of over 1.3 billion people with so many languages.

If you look at any Indian currency bill (Rupee), you'd see the denomination written in words in 22 languages, though in a smaller font. Those are the official languages of India. The official languages of the central government are Hindi and English. All government communications between the central government and state governments or between state governments commonly happen in English because India does not have one language identified as a "national language". Administrative nightmares are avoided by the use of English, which then gets translated to local languages as required. Apart from the 22 official languages, there are nearly a thousand languages/dialects (the distinctions are quite hazy) spoken in the country.

What your Indian friend experienced could be because of an assumption that many people in the north make about Hindi being the lingua franca around the country. The truth is that while Bollywood has made Hindi more widespread than it otherwise would be, every section of the country its non-Hindi languages, be it west, east, north east or the south, resists the imposition of Hindi by governments. People in many states, not just in the south, may not even understand Hindi or speak it even if their languages are closer to Hindi.

Among Indians, only someone from some of the northern states (where Hindi is the official language) would mistakenly think of Hindi as a "national language" or a bridge language.

Can attest to this as someone who has Indian parents but not born in India. You can get further with English than you would with Hindi in some parts.

It seems India’s education has done well for introducing English to the young kids.

You still have huge language barriers. I am impressed by the diversity of the world. m

Most software is still very US centric and that makes me sad at times. English became a standard because the Victorian empire was very good at colonizing and pushing their ideas down other cultures’ throats. Good for them.

But when one learns other languages, you begin to realize how broken and inconsistent English is. If English would be a programming language, it would be PHP.

Every language has its ups and downs. English is broken and inconsistent, but compared to, say, German (which I'm learning now), at least the core grammar is less complicated, it's more flexible, and most importantly there are no noun genders goddamn I hate those so much.

I visited a Hyderabad office that used English with each other, not just with me, because half were locals who knew Telugu and half were recent arrivals who knew Hindi.

> In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.

The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).

I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)

[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.

For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modi_script

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.

I knew 4 languages before I went to school. My parents know 2 additional languages (they grew up in a different state) than me. I can't read, speak or write these languages. So, if I travel to the place where they grew up - I'm a tourist.

The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

Think of Mandarin like English. Many regions only have it as second language, with not everyone speaking it well (and just like with English, younger generations do better on average). In regions where it is the first language, it is usually a dialect differing from Standard Mandarin.

Canton (guangzhou) speaks Cantonese, Shanghai speaks Shanghainese, and so it goes, with none of these languages having much at all to do with Mandarin (The Shanghainese use of tones is closer to Scandinavian languages than other Chinese languages!). In Hong Kong, Mandarin would be your third language in school, unused in public except to communicate with visiting mainlanders.

Writing is basically isolated from the spoken language, so there the primary concern is that some areas use traditional Chinese, whereas others use simplified.

That's exaggerated, outside of Cantonese-speaking areas Mandarin is the native language of the younger generations.

That isn't true. Many people will speak their local dialect as a native language, even outside of cantonese speaking areas. My wife is from a town in Hunan, her mandarin is native, but that's because her mom and dad were from different places in Hunan. But there are still many kids in that area who speak Mandarin with a heavy accent...

Cantonese isn't very special as Chinese dialects go; e.g. Taiwanese/Fujianese (Min Chinese) are just as proud of their dialect (more so in Taiwan where the push for mandarin is not as strong as on the mainland).

I disagree, but I'd like to add that just like everywhere else in the world, the younger generations have a higher average level of education and linguistic skill, thus being better at both second and third languages than the previous generations.

Mandarin words are also adopted in local languages to fill gaps by the younger generations, just like English words are often put to use in the west. Not as fully incorporated loan-words, but just as a Mandarin word randomly injected into a foreign language sentence (Those speaking Cantonese use English words instead).

However, the native tongue of the younger generations is not Mandarin, at least not in any of the areas I have knowledge of.

Source: Married to a native Shanghainese (who is in the 20-30 range) who spend half her life in Hong Kong, and thus spoke Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin and English fluently out of necessity (more western languages have been added to the list later on).

Previously most Hong-Kong movies were in Mandarin (under the Shaw Brothers), but since the eighties they switched back to Cantonese. Only the state sponsored, politically correct Peking-film school movies and TV is mandarin, the popular movies are all in Cantonese.

To add to this (as a Hong Kong native): Hong Kong is definitely a weird, special case, having belonged to Britain until 1997 and basically most people growing up there on some level despise the mainland, communism, and the language. To this day there's a certain level of disdain and judgment against you if you speak Mandarin there, almost like you're branded as "the others".

It's also true that provinces with rich cultures far away from Beijing continue to have their local dialects thrive. This is very true of Guangdong and Sichuan/Chongqing (see Sichuan rap). Yunnan also is quite noted for having many minorities and dialects still being preserved. The same cannot be said for Shanghai, where the younger generation have been eager to adopt to just speaking Mandarin as the mainstream thing to do. I had a girlfriend from Wuhan, and she grew up listening to the dialect there but her parents never encouraged her to converse in it, so she only speaks Mandarin.

My wife is from Shanghai, but spent the later half of her life in Hong Kong, so she speaks Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English fluently and now also Danish and Swedish intermediate. As I am Scandinavian, I am mostly just conveying her knowledge and my brief observations, all while she makes me feel horribly inadequate in the language department.

I recall a trip to Shanghai a while back where my wife mentioned that her Shanghainese was rusty, which she felt resulted in her being considered foreign. It would appear to me that people were still preferring Shanghainese, although she did mention that Mandarin words were used at random.

Are you talking about a younger generation yet, or might I have been misunderstanding something (very probable)? I'd ask her myself, but she's in Mainland doing research right now, and The Great Firewall makes communication patchy at best. :/

I've spent 2 years in Shanghai as an exchange student, and I think whether you get the impression that the "younger generation" no longer speaks Shanghainese depends a lot on whether you focus on people born in Shanghai to parents both speaking Shanghainese, or all inhabitants of Shanghai in that age group.

The former are likely to speak at least a little Shanghainese, but limited due to only using it at home and with some of their friends. The latter don't really have a need to learn Shanghainese, because Mandarin is the language used in school and for all kinds of business.

Personally, I only know one native Shanghainese speaker. Because my friends are university students from all over the country, the actual proportions are likely not as extreme, but I still think that Shanghainese speakers are a minority by now.

Similar to my wife, she's from Shantou and speaks her local dialect Teochew (pretty much used by everyone in her hometown), Mandarin and also Cantonese fluently.

According to her though, everyone in her city speaks the local dialect, and they only speak Mandarin if needed.

It depends.

I've been in the middle of Sichuan (in Tibetan counties), many of the older people don't understand mandarin while the younger people do. The same applies to rural Xinjiang.

Definitely Mandarin will get you farther in China than English, but it isn't quite universal yet.

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