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Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

This is almost certainly wrong but is worth a mention given that the author can't figure it out. In Southern India, there is a language known as Kannada. It has 43 million speakers, which, fun trivia, is more than the population of Canada (38 million). While "Kannada" and "Canada" are pronounced differently, I wonder whether there could be some clicks from Kannada speakers who think they are selecting the local English dialect. The English 'k' and 'c' sounds are so close together that perhaps Kannada speakers with weak English are trying to sound it out? Would be curious to hear someone from India chime in.

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Kannadiga* here.

very interesting theory.

Although I haven't come across many Kannadigas who choose en_CA due to KA and CA sounding similar, this is an angle for sure.

But OP's guess (en_CA alphabetically above en_GB / en_US) is a more possible reality.

Another trivia: Kannada-English dialect is called "Kanglish" here. Ex: "ಲಾಕ್-ಡವ್ನ್ ! ಬಸ್ಸು ಕಾರು ಎಲ್ಲಾ ರೋಡಿಂದಾ ಬ್ಯಾನ್!" [phonetic: 'lockdown! baSSu, kaaru ellaa road-indaa byaan!'] Though the sentence is accepted to be Kannada, only true Kannada word there is "ellaa" (=> all)

Kanglish is the norm here, and textbook Kannada isn't getting good love from many. The onslaught of Sankrit on pure classical Kannada is a different topic altogether, for another day!

*people from Karnataka who speak Kannada.

Not too sure about Kanglish being the norm - I'd guess it depends upon which part of Bengaluru (making a wild guess here) you're in?

Where I live, that sentence would usually turn out to be something like "Naale inda lockdown, vahanagaLu yavdu Ache barubaaradu".

>> Where I live, that sentence would usually turn out to be something like "Naale inda lockdown, vahanagaLu yavdu Ache barubaaradu".

Mass media has gone bonkers my friend.

If you haven't been following, they even had a headline "first night curfew, hegirutte gottaa!?" with "first night" in a different color.

It's all about masala headlines. Nobody bothers about textbook Kannada anymore, except of course students and hapless Kannada teachers.

Media out here are total sellouts who are just busy peddling absolute BS to their viewers, anything and everything for TRPs

I assumed you were referring to how people normally conversed in Kannada :)

Personally, I don't consider TV Kannada to be indicative of the language spoken on the streets or in the homes of the city. I would be concerned if this headline had made its appearance in print; I don't think that has happened yet.

Every language tends to evolve and borrow some amount of vocabulary from other languages. I've seen this to be especially true when the spoken and written forms are different, as is the case with quite a few Indian languages. The language spoken on the street is not textbook Kannada - it hasn't been textbook Kannada in forever! None of "Hegidiya Guru" or "Yenu Maga" or "Bro!" is a textbook example of an interpersonal greeting - you'd be hard pressed to find the first one in vogue these days, it is now history. The spoken form continues to evolve on its own. (I can see this being the case with at least three other languages).

> "first night curfew, hegirutte gottaa!?" with "first night" in a different color.

I laughed so hard at this. Is it TV9?

Has to be! I'd be very surprised if it wasn't :)

This is unlikely IMO. There is no local Kannada-English dialect and even Kannada speakers with weak English would know how to spell it.

My guess is it’s because English (Canada) comes first, before English (United Kingdom) and English (United States), in the list and most people in India are just selecting the first one (en-ca) without preference to any locale.

In India when it comes to technology we(majority) use english almost everywhere, from TV menus to phone apps to the tiny cybercafes in a remote place, everywhere it is in english even with the option of choosing our own language. This is due to a couple of reasons: we have been accustomed to the use of English with any tech product you can think of since it was first launched in India, also no one wants to go through the settings and change the defaults. Also the english dialect here is English-India. Kannada is its own language. I also came to the same conclusion as the author here, EN-CA was the first on the list.

Not just technology either, the two languages for the Indian Parliament are Hindi and English - a relic of colonialism as well (and in a country with 20 odd languages, multiple scripts and hundreds of dialects a lingua franca is required to get anything done without translators on both sides).

The academics are still arguing over whether English is a world language or not but it is the defacto world language and I don't know of another language that can make that claim.

Curiously it's the most widely spoken language while been only the third most spoken native language.

A result of two centuries of the British Empire followed by a century of US dominance in media/business.

The only language that gets close is Mandarin but the split of native to non-native is pretty much inverted between English and Mandarin.

> the english dialect here is English-India

Do you think that users of Firefox in India would like to have “English-India” as one of the language preference choices for the browser? At present, Firefox seems to offer only United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

In contrast, Mac OS offers eight versions of English for the system language: Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, and United States.

I can't speak for others, but me personally - it doesn't matter when it comes to the interface. I'm cool with En_IN, En_GB and En_US. Whatever the default is, I let that be. I read so much user generated content (like this thread!) where I can't control the locale, so I have to be cool with it.

I'm more particular about the input, especially if it's auto-correcting. I prefer "analyse" to "analyze" and other similar changes so I set the software keyboard accordingly. En_GB and En_IN would both be fine, except for the currency symbols. I prefer En_IN because it gives me access to the Rupee symbol (₹).

Of course English India will be preferred if offered. I checked this on Windows that there is an option within firefox language preferences to set it to system settings. Anyways the En-In will be welcomed but is not a necessary condition though. We do just fine without it for now.

I’m from, and live in, Karnataka and have deliberately set my iPhone locale to Kannada.

That said, I’m almost certain it’s not because of people here mistakenly setting their locale to Canada. Because most of the consumers can understand English to an extent to use it on their phone. Secondly the Kannada translation is horribly bad to an extent of being useless. Most of the day to day phone use in Kannada is impossible because no one has bothered to translate the modern terms and phrases to Kannada.

My money was on all the Punjabis going back and forth to BC

Wouldn’t it be more informative to say Sikhs?

A Punjabi Sikh can renounce his religion but he would still be Punjabi.

(Sikhism is the dominant religion of the Punjab region.)

Most Punjabis are not Sikhs. If you live in North America, a lot of Punjabis you may have come across may have been Sikhs.

(Nearly) All Sikhs are Punjabi but not all Punjabis are Sikh.

The P in Pakistan (a majority Muslim country) arguably stands for Punjab,

From wikipedia:

> using it as an acronym .., and referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan.

That said, there are a non-trivial number of Sikhs in the area, at least one Sikh holy site is very near the Pakistan-India border in the Punjab region.

My family hailed from East Punjab before the Partition and wasn’t (and isn’t) Sikh.

There are many non-Sikh Punjabis.

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