India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years
nagalandpost.com
nagalandpost.com
First, archive -- record the language, its linguistic structure & features for science's and posterity's sake.
Then, coalesce all these regional (particularly North Indian) dialects and languages into Standard Hindi. Standard Hindi itself could perhaps be allowed to evolve by absorbing features from the languages it extirpates and form a "New Hindi".
This would be easier done in the North. With the South Indian languages there's practically not much of an option besides teaching them Hindi, and encouraging Hindi adoption in the home. The South Indian (Dravidian) languages are so different from the North Indian (Indo-Aryan) languages, that they share barely anything in common with Hindi (besides some common vocabulary). Alternatively, the South could be encouraged to switch to English, but this would probably prove too politically controversial.
Finally but not the least, Hindi needs to be turned into a language of the arts and sciences -- particularly in the the sciences, or rather, in all STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine). Most countries (China, Germany, Korea, France, Japan, the Arab countries, etc.) -- all use their own languages for the majority of things they do. In India, English continues to dominate, perhaps in a desirable fashion -- but at least for the sake of 95% Indians who don't really speak English, it would be good to give them access to the STEM fields without forcing them to learn a totally different/new language.
That is the most cruel thing I have read this month.
Really horrible idea. It would be controversial if you would clarify your reasons but until then it is just stupid. My reasoning? You first.
Edit: I consciously ignored Tower of Babel due it being a misplaced argument.
Languages evolve all the time. If everyone were to hang on to the languages and identities that were present and predominant at the end of the twentieth century, I don't think we'd get anywhere closer to a more global society. As a nation, there's much more of a reason to have a common language.
Now give me an example of a country as diverse and massive as India whose lingual diversity was a hindrance to growth. I will just go ahead and respond. There is none. India is unique and there is no evidence it's current model won't work.
Languages evolve all the time> Incorrect. Languages evolve over centuries due to several geopolitical reasons like: land topography, availability of food, neighboring tribes. Each language and it's multiple dialects are an imprint of the struggle their speakers went through over hundreds or thousands of years. In case of India, the frequency is so high since it has been a melting pot of the world for a very large period of time.
>Global society Contrary to what you believe it's not synonymous with a central society. The ultimate goal of the human race is a moving target. Adopting a common language so that we can do better trade, better science and produce more is fallacious since we don't know that's we are supposed to do. Maybe we need to slow down so that we don't kill ourselves off by becoming too powerful and cocky. I don't know. Neither do you.
You can learn multiple languages. You can even learn multiple dialects. One of the things I'm proud of my grandfather for was that he learned 22 different dialects of Chinese for the purposes of doing business on a fairly wide scale.
Imperialism is sort of not a thing these days.
At age 21, I have already immigrated twice to countries with different languages, and I have always considered language as the major barrier in everything I always did (because past a certain age, no matter how hard I try, I keep the accent).
I dream of a world where language is a concern of the past. It just makes no sense to keep this hindrance around when there are important things to do.
And which language and universal accent should the world switch to?
In my experience, it does, in most social contexts, and also in job interviews, as some interviewers don't feel it would be as easy for me to integrate to the rest of the team, which is true to some extent. These may all be exceptions but it's a big indicator in my opinion.
>And which language and universal accent should the world switch to?
I think any language known to me would do. When the time comes and people feel ready to accept the idea of one language (looking at the replies I got, it's not gonna happen), we'll discuss it.
That's presuming that the very notion of a one world language would even work, considering all we know about linguistic mutations.
What you want is akin to, "Why are we wasting all this time fighting cancer when we could be achieving spaceflight?" Maybe, just maybe, it's people that are important?
I never said I was going to dictate anything onto anyone, it's an opinion, and yours is acknowldged. 7 billion+ to go.
>That's presuming that the very notion of a one world language would even work, considering all we know about linguistic mutations.
The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed.
>What you want is akin to, "Why are we wasting all this time fighting cancer when we could be achieving spaceflight?"
Not really. IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages.
This wasn't the problem.
The problem was that your opinion was to have a universal language.
This is textbook imperialism. This is why English has such major influences from French and Latin when it's essentially a Germanic language. Because a couple of empires invaded England and imposed their language.
> The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed.
The US prints out reams of extra paperwork precisely so that it can be offered in multiple languages. The US fought and continues to fight proxy wars dealing with how these immigrants are integrated into the culture. New York City used to be a battleground between the Italians and the Irish. Read just about any significant span of American history and you'll find a disagreement between two different sets of immigrants. Don't need no West Side Story to explain it.
Of course, at the same time, the US invented the network standard dialect of English while making fun of Californian versus Midwestern versus New England versus Southern accents. Odd... those are also some of the clearest political battlefield lines historically. And it's the US who is internationally laughed at for having the least informed and most cross-culturally inept population in the world.
Furthermore, do you really want the US to be the de jure overlord of the entire world? Because I don't.
And lastly, linguistic mutation. Even if you buy into the Chomskyian notion of a universal grammar inherent in the biological human brain, you still have the fact that language evolves differently for different groups of people and there isn't any way to reliably intermingle them on a regular basis unless you use top-down imposition.
> IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages.
So, basically, you want to do this: http://xkcd.com/927/
While that's impressive, this only shows how much better it would have been for trade & business if Chinese people at the point spoke a single language. A businessman wouldn't have to learn 22 languages (quite a significant time investment), to have the same level of reach your grandfather did.
Those familiar with the political tensions in the South (especially Tamil Nadu) between Dravidian Languages & Indo-Aryan, would point out that you'd have better luck getting them to switch to English than Hindi at this point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitation_of_1937%E2...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil_...
Do you have a reason why this is necessary?
> Finally but not the least, Hindi needs to be turned into a language of the arts and sciences
Given the many advantages of learning science in a global language, what would be gained by trying to rewrite everything in a regional language? Is it really easier to rewrite textbooks, and translate scientific papers into Hindi, than it is for children to learn a language (English)?
You must realize having a thousand non-compatible incoherent languages isn't practical in modern, technological, Internet-driven society.
In fact, they should all be sidelined and replaced by English. Problem solved. There are already more people speaking English in India than there are Americans.
BTW: India isn't a modern, Internet-driven society yet. We are still getting people to be able to read and write.
The second half of your comment makes things weird/passive aggressive and personal. Not to mention the attempt at condescension. I in no way gave or am giving my personal point of view here.
FYI I don't speak Hindi. The only languages I speak are English and Malayalam. I've lived outside India most of my life (was born in the UAE), so Hindi is something I never got a chance to learn.
But I do think India would benefit if her people spoke one common language rather than the dozen or so they do today. I just think Standard/New Hindi would be an ideal single language for the nation (just as Gandhi did), esp. since 400+ million people already speak it.
There's so much pride dripping from every word forming a pool of vitriol towards anything not-like-the-speaker.
(and if "Language and Culture are central to Identity" perhaps we should cultivate a larger view of the world? Being blindingly obsessed with culture and history isn't healthy. Forming your entire identity around the past leads to moronic things like never ending wars because someone slighted someone else's father two hundred years ago.)
I was merely stating that Hindi would be an ideal language for the whole nation, and that we'd be better off without the Tower of Babel situation we have now. I'd be happy to pick up Hindi if there was some serious drive towards making it the lingua franca of the nation.
Also FYI, I have a difficult time communicating with the average Indian if I'm anywhere outside Kerala - would be nice if there was one language we could all learn, and use to communicate with each other.
You may want to make your points without making personal attacks or bad generalizations.
All other issues with your post aside, this is not a thing that we can do. The subtleties of a real language that real people speak can neither be fully deduced from recording it nor is it likely that it can be archived in a way that actually preserves most of the things that make it interesting (that is, the methods available to us for encoding a language encode the words and grammatical rules, and very often lose many of the meaningful components).
That is, we cannot successfully archive these languages. How does this fact impact your thesis?
Wrong link? This video has to do with healthcare. (I didn't watch the whole thing though.)
> India needs to adopt an archive and extinguish
> policy with its many regional languages.
The republic would fall apart before that happens.
> but at least for the sake of 95% Indians who
> don't really speak English, it would be good
> to give them access to the STEM fields without
> forcing them to learn a totally different/new language
For most North Indians (speakers of Indo-Aryan languages), Hindi would probably be a lot easier to pick up than English. On top of that, they get to interact with a large population of fluent Hindi speakers, and get really good at it, to the point of it (potentially) being a language spoken at home.
I've been in Bangalore, and the English of the majority of programmers I've met here is utterly atrocious. They butcher sentences and are incapable of constructing a single grammatical sentence. Personally, I wouldn't criticize them if this hadn't been coupled with appallingly bad coding skills.
One solid reason to promote Hindi is this. They can actually get good at the language. Hindi is also much more likely to transition into becoming their home language than English.
PS: Good to know that your sample set for passing judgement on India is a handful of programmers you met in Bangalore.
I wasn't passing judgment on India. I was just pointing out the fact that the majority of programmers in Bangalore speak pretty terrible English. If I were to "pass judgment" on India as a whole, it would be for the lack of sanitation.[1]
I say majority, because I've met some pretty smart programmers through an HN meetup that was held in Bangalore sometime ago.[2] I also personally know a lot of Indians who have excellent English. Generally, I think the level of one's English is directly proportional to how much of a bookworm one is. (This probably applies to native speakers as well.) India has sizable English readership, who probably all can express themselves eloquently in English.
The only reason that you advocate learning hindi over English is the ease of picking up the language, which I believe is just plain wrong. The English language is structurally much more free, and easy to pick up than a language such as hindi.
That being said, your premise of standardizing one language seems to be resting on the rather flimsy idea that if the majority of people spoke one language, they would speak it well.
A language is (usually) only spoken well when introduced at a very young age, and that seems to be the only determining factor as to whether one particular language should become an Indian standard. (If anything that language should be Sanskrit since it's the most structurally sound language among almost all the Indian languages)
What do you mean by structure here? (If you could give me pointers to Wikipedia article / other articles on what entails the structure of a languages as you describe it, that would be good.)
> they would speak it well.
That could be achieved with education. In the US, there's quite a heavy emphasis on English. College entrance exams (the SAT, the GRE, etc.) test you on English more than anything else. And communication underpins to a significant extend, one's success in almost any field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Divergent_usage
Bangalore is a melting pot, of sorts. Having worked here for donkey's years, I have come across colleagues from various parts of India. Colleagues who grew up in bit cities speak perfectly grammatical English; colleagues from towns often bring in their regionalisms. Looking back, I'd say that less than 10% of my colleagues were raised in cities. Perhaps this is what led you to believe that the people of Bangalore butcher English. We generally don't.
> hadn't been coupled with appallingly bad coding skills
This could be a reflection on their attitude towards learning, in general.
> They can actually get good at the language.
Oh yeah? Try learning Hindi. Its grammatical gender drives me nuts.
The rest of your comments (this, and others) are just wild(!) speculation. I'll leave it at that.
Okay, you have a good point here. I don't actually speak any Hindi, and I was under the impression that it was easy to pick up. I've not yet tried to learn Hindi -- been putting it off as I don't see any immediate use to it. (I won't be in India for long.) I didn't know it had grammatical gender. I remember taking some French in high school, and being pissed off at the gender assigned to every object. I don't know why languages do this.
Perhaps a language research institute should be set up to construct a simple easy-to-learn language that sort-of meshes together the major Indo-Aryan tongues (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.) -- something that would be easy for the speakers of those languages to learn; but also not too hard for speakers of Dravidian languages. :)
Hindi is only something like marginally older than English in India. Within a few years you can almost say English is a better candidate as a common language than Hindi can even dream to be.
>>On top of that, they get to interact with a large population of fluent Hindi speakers
And where is that 'large population'? Delhi, Uttar Pradesh? and then apart from that where? That is not even 10% of India.
>>I've been in Bangalore, and the English of the majority of programmers I've met here is utterly atrocious.
Compared to the British English standards we are something like miles ahead of most Americans or probably a good part of the anglosphere. News papers, publications, magazines, essays almost in any measure India will outscore US or any English speaking country in the world
>>They butcher sentences and are incapable of constructing a single grammatical sentence
Don't get me started, Most Americans can't even pronounce words completely. Most use double negatives frequently while forming sentences.
>>Personally, I wouldn't criticize them if this hadn't been coupled with appallingly bad coding skills.
I see this pretty much everywhere. I don't know what your problem is exactly. You think the outsourcing scenario was scary? That was just the very beginning. There is nothing really stopping India's progress on the world scale, and software is just one tiny little area where India's is making rapid progress.
I wonder what is the true nature of the problem the west and in general white English speaking population has with India. If you are just pissed that a nation you ruled and looted for 200 years is just giving you back a dose of your own medicine. Sorry I can't help much on that end, as I said this is just the beginning. Much is about the come.
/sarcasm
Edit: Also note that one of the major causes of the 1971 breakup of Pakistan was that they tried enforcing use of Urdu in east pakistan against the very popular Bangla language.
The world is slowly moving towards fewer, broader languages, and that's a good thing as it dissolves cultural barriers, improves communication, and makes it easier to see your neighbors as people like yourself. Trying to force the process to move faster would be disastrous.
Just something as simple as encouraging the adoption of language Y at home, and encouraging (not necessarily forcing) its use in schools, the media, etc. should do the job.
In China, the government is already tying to stifle the use of Cantonese (the second-most widely spoken language after Mandarin), by restricting Cantonese-language TV channels. I think actions like that go too far, and especially wouldn't recommend it in India, where ethnic tensions would flare up quickly were the government to even think of doing something like this.
They should rather just make it so that switching will be the sensible thing for the vast majority of people. If Hindi gains predominance in the STEM fields, humanities, and in other places, it will be natural for people to learn it and eventually start using it at home.
For instance, the vast majority of Americans are not of English ancestry by any means[1]. In fact, the largest ancestries are German and Irish. I imagine, most of these immigrants eventually picked up English and transitioned to using it at home at some point. I've also read German was even spoken in small pockets (e.g. in Pennsylvania) until the early 1900s. Can you imagine what the US would've been like, if every immigrant group decided to retain their language and identity?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry#Ancestry
You seriously think people are simply going to throw away their linguistic culture, literature and other major accomplishments which are happening from at least some 3000 years old(Nearly every South Indian language will fall in this bracket) and then adopt one common standard which is not even spoken by 10% Indians? All for what?
Compared to any South Indian language, Hindi is a baby. And even that is saying something.
You've essentially described a plan akin to converting everything in the US to New Metric (a system that is similar to metric but has 2.7182 as the scaling factor for centi, mega, and tera but 3.141 for kilo, 10 for giga, and the unit of length will be the new metre which corresponds to 0.707 of a mile). Everyone will be on the same system. It'll be great.
Or is that just an aircraft manufacturing oddity?
Also, eww. But we americans do need to get on the metric train eventually.
India has English for its STEM needs; killing of languages because some nuts (including ones in the parliament) dislike diversity is just plain silly. What are you going to recommend next, teach English to all of Europe, and "archive" French, German, Baltic and Uralic languages ? Sure.
The middle class forms atleast 25% of the population, certainly they speak English. I'm sure many more do, too. Hindi is no more a "national language" of India than Tamil is. If anything, Sanskrit is the language with which most Indic languages share a heritage.
When did being multilingual become a bad thing. Sheesh, this must be an all time low for Hacker news.
On a bad day I will find you and kick your ass, call your mom bad stuff in my language for saying that.
Further, I think you missing a large characteristic, at the lack of a better word, indian identity. India is more like a salad bowl where you have mix of a different things but each preserving its distinguishing characteristic rather than the oft used analogy of a melting pot, where the diversity gets melded into something uniform. If anyone even tries to do what you suggest there is going to be rebellion and violence. This is not hypothetical, it has been tried and the results havent been pretty. Look up Feb 21. If you look up the violent centrifugal movements in India (Punjab, Kashmir, to an extent Tamil Nadu), the perception that the center was keen on establishing a different culture, identity played an important role in precipitating them. We have spent huge amount of resources, human and otherwise to contain these. Some of these are still ongoing. So, enough of this idiocy already.
Having opinions is fine, but it is usually better when they are grounded in background knowledge.
What you are voicing has been voiced before and occupies a central position in the manifesto of RSS/VHP who have been trying hard since before independence, to define India in terms of hindi and hindu supremacy and to constitute a political church of unified hinduism. They are the moral equivalent of skinheads, indulging in violence on minorities. I am not saying that you advocate their views, I hope not. What I am saying however, is that there your views forms a big chunk of their world view. What surprised me intitially is their presence in student campuses outside of India, but it made complete sense later.
What I had come here to say is however quite different. As a child I had spent a lot of time in the north-eastern part of india and have very fond memories. I had apparently picked up a few of these languages well (Angami, Sema and a creole called Nagamese), to the extent that I would often get praised for being so fluent in them. I find it remarkable and sad that I retain none of it. Now I would not even understand if someone spoke in the languages I had picked up. So learning languages is certainly not the same as learning to ride a bicycle.
Should this be applied to Europe also? Should Germans, French and Italians all drop their languages and convert to English?
Every language in India has roots in Sanskrit. In which case any language should do right?
Which in case I propose why not the entire India say learn Tulu?
I am a stereotypically monolingual American--years of study allow me to mumble a few sentences of Spanish, German, and an even smaller amount of Japanese. I cannot even conceive of 800/1100+ languages--it's like trying to understand the scale of the Sun or imagine how fast light travels compared to say, a motorcycle or walking.
I was hoping someone here on HN was going to give a little background on what 880 living languages even means. Mostly, in a linguistic/cognitive sense, but also in a cultural/economic/political sense.