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Comment by karthikvellanki | Hacker News Reader

Your co-worker's observation is actually more obvious than we think it is.

Since states in India are essentially divided based on linguistic grounds, he would have been exposed to two Indian languages at best - the regional language in his town and Hindi (if the dominant language in the town is not Hindi already).

In the Bay Area you'll find people from various states of India.

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> In the Bay Area you'll find people from various states of India.

Doesn't the same thing happen within India itself, due to internal interstate migration? Not everyone who works in (for example) Bangalore's IT industry grew up there.

On a related note, does that make people in (e.g.) Bangalore speak Hindi more than Kannada?

In China, the purpose-built electronics city of Shenzhen is full of migrants from other regions, so the local language is Mandarin even though the surrounding Guangdong province speaks Cantonese.

Not really... native Bangaloreans generally make it a point not to speak Hindi. As for people in the IT Sector, "English is the Lingua Franca" (pun intended) :)

The three states surrounding karnatake (where banglore is located) don't speak Hindi...

In Hyderabad which is in a neighboring state to Bangalore, most people speak both Telugu and Hindi.

Among white collar workers English is pretty common.

It does, but it's more likely if you're in one of the large cities - Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai. People move for jobs and economic opportunity. Smaller cities have fewer opportunities and thus fewer reasons for out-of-state people to move there.

Similarly, there is a wider variety of European languages spoken in New York than in a village in France.

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