It's a pity there's no (link to the) definition of language they used. With so many, where do you draw the line?
The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect.
> A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German.
Most of the well-known Indian languages actually fail this test. Someone who has grown up speaking Hindi cannot reliably converse with someone in Bangla, Sambalpuri, or Tamil. If anything, the word "dialect" is overused regarding India – Bhojpuri [2] was often mentioned as a dialect of Hindi; but as a fluent Hindi speaker I cannot claim to understand or have a fluid conversation with someone speaking Bhojpuri. I am glad that it is at least sometimes referred to as a language now.
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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...
A lot of western-educated people have asked me “So Hindi is the main language, and there are a lot of different dialects throughout the country, right?” – and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that, so I go with the time-tested “Well, it's slightly different...”
(I have studied Sanskrit and Hindi in school for multiple years, and can understand a good amount of Marathi and Tamil.)
You can say this - I think it is true, not quite verified (partly heard from older relatives, partly deduction based on observing similarities in the mentioned languages' vocabularies):
Sanskrit came first - thousands of years ago. It is the language of the Vedas, 4 of India's most ancient scriptures. Many northern (including east and west) Indian languages are similar to Sanskrit and likely are descendants of it. Hindi, Gujarati, Marwari, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya (not sure, but it sounds some like Bengali), Marathi, are some of these.
Languages of Indian states further east than Bengal, called the North Eastern states, like Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, etc. may not show a lot of Sanskrit influence because they may have Oriental influence instead, such as from SE Asia, China, etc. Except Assamese may have some Sanskrit influence, also not sure of Manipuri.
And of the southern states in the peninsula, Tamil has the least Sanskrit influence and is also said to be very ancient. The other three, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, have some Sanskrit influence.
Caveat: I am not a language expert.
What about the Bhagavatapurana is Tamil?
I stand corrected about Assamese's relationship with Bengali.
Yes, that is nearly same as what I said above, except I said "likely", because I was not sure, not being a language expert. And that "likely" applied to the other languages I mentioned too, in that sentence.
Edit: Actually, I am (still anecdotally) pretty sure of it for at least Hindi and Marathi, because both of them have too many words which are the same as, or derived from Sanskrit, for it to be a mistake.
It seems easy to say, "actually, no, India has multiple unrelated language groups as different from each other as English is from Hindi, and I don't just mean in isolated villages"
Tarek Fatah makes a point about why Urdu isn't a distinct language from Hindi.
IIRC Sanskrit has also been written in dozens of scripts, there's a perfect one-to-one transliteration into most (maybe all) the north-indian scripts, although they have extra characters for their own sounds.
For example, a lawyer & a rapper might both compose their works in English, while adopting a register & jargon geared towards their respective audiences. Their works might very well be largely incomprehensible to each others target audiences.
Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas neighboring the Hindi belt) are not dialects, they are languages, even though from that list Gujrati and Marathi use Devnagri script (or very close to it).
Checking wikipedia, it mentions a "Punjabi diaspora family of languages." These distinctions seem understandable and interesting to me, of European descent and non-political.
thanks yumraj, for the many posts here today on this, it feels important at some basic level.
I enjoyed reading "In Search of the Cradle of Civilization" long ago.. and studied personally with one of the authors, in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Kak#In_Search_of_the_C...
Interestingly, Pakistan has a state called Punjab where Punjabi is the main language, but I’m not sure what script they use.
Regarding Hindi and Urdu, I found the wikipedia page to at least be informative. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controver...
Are there any other examples of such a language?
Konkani in the Devanagari script is an official language of India & the state language of Goa - while Christian Konkanis (a sizable proportion of the population) prefer to write it in the Latin script.
Kashmiri Pundits used the Sharda script, while Muslim Kashmiris wrote it in the Persian script.
Historically, the picture is more complicated. People were familiar with multiple scripts, and shifted across them based on context and jargon. For example, when the British took Sindh from the Nawab, they found the natives writing the same language in multiple scripts. The administration of the erswhile Nawab worked in Persian, while merchants used Khudabadi, a landa script related to Gurmukhi. They found that women in the home preferred the Devanagari script, as did the priestly class. Since the British were most concerned with the needs of the Persianate clerks, they mandated that Sindhi only in the Persian script would be taught in schools. You will find similar situations across India, with people adopting scripts geared towards the audience they were writing to, rather than an exclusive formalized script unique to a language. Literate Medieval Indian would be fluent in multiple languages and scripts, and combined them in interesting ways.
On a tangent, I recall an argument by Bhagat Singh that the different languages of India should adopt a common script to foster unity - Devanagari in his opinion.
The ones I mentioned as dialects are indeed dialects, at least per commonly accepted standards.
I believe both Urdu and Hindi came from Hindustani which was derived from Khari Boli.
For example, when the British took Sindh, they found that officials of the erstwhile Nawab administration used the Persian script, while merchants used the Khudabadi landa script. Women and priests, however, largely used the Devanagari script. The British adopted the Persian script for Sindhi since the clerks they absorbed used it.
A similar story played out with Marathi. From the time of the Marathas till as late as the 1920s, Marathi was written formally in the Modi (ie, twisted) script. The British pushed for the adoption of the Devanagari script, since it would simplify logistics at printing presses.
This is probably true of most large, diverse languages. Each dialect has drifted sufficiently far from each other than while it is possible to communicate with other dialects, it's most convenient to use the shared formalized standard register. So while a Malvani speaker can largely comprehend the dialect of somebody from Gadchiroli, more often both speakers will switch to the standard Marathi register they learnt in school.