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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

I know this may be controversial opinion, but I think India needs to adopt an archive and extinguish policy with its many regional languages. Frankly, there's too many languages.

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.

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Every language and culture is important to its people. If you love Hindi, use it, but don't try to shove it under our ass. In South India, we study English and don't need Hindi for anything. So get lost with your language of illiterates! Hindi is only one of the official languages of central government of India - India has another 22 official languages. So you have no right to decide what language we use. Indian union is the result of a pact, a pact to preserve our culture and language. The minute that is violated, there is no union. By the way, how about archiving and extinguishing your favourite language???

Angry much?

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.

Esperanto. I vote for Esperanto. Burn your Shakespeares and your Homers and come learn STEM in the One True Language.

That seems almost as easy as achieving 100% literacy.

BTW: India isn't a modern, Internet-driven society yet. We are still getting people to be able to read and write.

What is your native language?

Isn't it then a paradox that the most developed regions in India speak a language other than Hindi?? Loss of a language is loss of culture; every time a language dies humanity loses an important part of its knowledge base - there is no one language in the world where all knowledge, wisdom and collective experiences are present - It is part of the fundamental rights of a person to preserve, nurture and cherish one's mother tongue. If you don't know - what you just stated is plain fascism.

Nothing anyone has said in this nested comment thread is fascism. Did you choose that word to convey your anger?

The notion of forcefully bringing about a change in popular culture is fascism at best. If you did not understand the politics behind this discussion, then you are either too naive or belong to the camp I mentioned.

Pushing for change is not the same as forcing something. Sometimes the spirit and essence of it can be close to the same. However there have only been initial and hand wavey vague discussions here. None of it being fascism [at best], literally or in spirit.

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.

Fascism is the notion - once it is in the mind, it can get into action - it is important that people understand the level of toxicity of the thought. Humanity is enriched by its languages and diversity. By the way, every notion (other than a proven fact) has personal and political dimensions.

> If you love Hindi, use it, but don't try to shove it under our ass.

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.

You don't have an iota of understanding about the language dynamics that led to the creation of India as it is today. Also language is culture, culture is identity. So people use their native languages with pride in India. Also Hindi is not the language educated people communicate in India - It is English. In fact the BIMARU states which use Hindi are the least developed among Indian regions with lowest literacy. South India in general developed primarily as we adopted English as our 2nd language long back which opened us to opportunities around the world and also cared to nurture our mother tongues. It is proven beyond doubt that mother tongue education is vital to the intellectual and social development of a child. Languages are a biological part of you and not a device that may be discarded at will (learn a bit about modern linguistics). The idea of single language for India has been rejected by its parliament and people (by the way, it is nothing but fasicsm - as an adjunct I can argue that the whole humanity must adopt a single language - does it make any sense??). English is the communication link of India, and that is the best outcome. So if BIMARU states give some importance to English, they also have a chance to develop.

    > India needs to adopt an archive and extinguish 
    > policy with its many regional languages.

My, oh my! I've read some pretty bizarre things on the net and this is right up there with them. Many smaller regional languages in India are under pressure and if they eventually go extinct then that's unfortunate but perhaps that's the way it is. But to suggest that languages need to be willfully stifled let alone in the case of major regional languages for the imposition of Hindi as the lingua franca of the "arts and sciences" is just bizarre.

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

Learning Hindi would mean learning a totally new language for the majority of Indians. Many would rather learn English as a second language.

> Learning Hindi would mean learning a totally new language for the majority of Indians. Many would rather learn English as a second 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.

As a north Indian, I can assure you that is not the case. Several decades of living there has not gotten in the way of my butchering Hindi sentences much worse than I butcher English.

PS: Good to know that your sample set for passing judgement on India is a handful of programmers you met in Bangalore.

> 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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623809

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563491

While it is possible that for speakers of Indo-Aryan languages hindi is probably easier to pick up, that says nothing of the ease of learning the language for the majority of Dravidian language speakers.

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)

> The English language is structurally much more free, and easy to pick up than a language such as hindi ...

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.

The dialect of Indian English takes some grammatical structure from other Indian languages. Some sentences may not be considered technically correct by British English or American English speakers, but are perfectly acceptable by Indian English standards. Some words or terms may have different usages, and pronunciation may differ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Divergent_usage

> I've been in Bangalore, and the English of the majority of programmers I've met here is utterly atrocious.

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.

> Oh yeah? Try learning Hindi. Its grammatical gender drives me nuts.

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. :)

As an Indian who has lived in all major cities (IT hubs) in India & some cities in China, I am now at conclusion that English is "The simple easy-to-learn" language for the masses (if others stop being pedantic about correctness of others). Also structure of republic of India will fail apart if any regional language is forced on others. This will not work. I suggest when you look at India look at is europe on a large scale. we certainly have more languages ( both written and spoken) than europe and varied ethnicity & unfortunately misplaced pride on accidents of life ( religion, cast, language, parents, region, past etc)

sir, language is an evolutionary device and not a synthetic thing that may be forced on people as you seem to think. You already reek too much of that idiot from Germany!!

I'm sure you can say the same thing about the Russians and the Israelis, no ? Oh wait, you can't.

>>For most North Indians (speakers of Indo-Aryan languages), Hindi would probably be a lot easier to pick up than English.

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.

This would be received very poorly by most of the sub-continent, and apart from being just controversial would be impossible to actually enforce.

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_...

An explicit "extinguish" policy would be stupid on several levels. Practical enforcement would be very difficult, it would create a lot of bad blood with speakers of minority languages, it would establish a precedent for forcible eradication of minority cultures, and it's not even necessary if languages are extinguishing themselves. By all means archive languages for science and posterity, and certainly protect minority groups from general cultural oppression; other than that, allow languages to grow or die organically as they always have.

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.

I didn't mean the government should try and actually do something stupid like forbid people to speak language X (in order extinguish it).

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

>>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.

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.

This exactly, a language spoken by almost less than 10% and then forcing it upon the rest of the people. If a common language is needed why not use English? Trying to to extinguish language?! - Now that is the most comical thing I have heard. As 'srean put it - 'spoken like a true armchair ignoramus'. Why is this even top comment?

I'm dying with laughter here. 'Controversial' describes this statement as well as it describes "I think the best way to cure cancer is to swallow large quantities of Drano".

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.

Is new metric the same thing that "metric inches" comes from?

Or is that just an aircraft manufacturing oddity?

Also, eww. But we americans do need to get on the metric train eventually.

"New metric" sounds an awful lot like the current US system where a pound, for example, is defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.

> Archive and Extinguish!

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.

Tower of Babel. I'm not sure "Extinguish" is necessary, but perhaps the teaching of a common language throughout the country would be beneficial. I can't imagine the United States having a different language for every House district, with only 5% of the population speaking common English.

Europe has its problems, but it's not that bad off either, in the grand scheme of things. It's slightly larger than the US and has a large variety of languages, including many countries with their own linguistic diversity. Italy, for instance, has regions where French and German are accepted, as well as a slew of regional "dialects/languages". Belgium has three official languages. Spain has several. And so on...

Switzerland with French, German and Italian depending on where you are.

Switzerland also has Ladino as one of its official languages.

Err, sorry, 'Romansh' is the name they use.

Well, India does not have to imagine that, since its common practice. A language is the identity of the people. I am not sure that India is ready to inorganically archive or extinguish the identities of its various sub-cultures. India is already proving that it can mix growth with diversity(albeit at a slower pace), but a section of the middle class think's this approach is too slow. I personally do not agree with the one language nation theory. It reeks of sectarianism.

Edit: I consciously ignored Tower of Babel due it being a misplaced argument.

China is a good counterexample to this. China had a huge number of "dialects" -- mutually un-intelligible dialects (and being mutually unintelligible is generally what distinguishes a language from a dialect). The Chinese government has sort-of successfully driven Mandarin as the lingua franca of the nation, and I can't imagine the Chinese having been anything but better off for it. Perhaps, there was some loss of cultural/linguistic heritage in the case of China, but that's why I said India should "archive" before extinguish.

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.

If you know anything about China's history, it cost them tens of millions of lives to surgically implement uniformity. Not just in language but in every thread of society.

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.

I don't know about you, but I'm not really a fan of China's political ideologies.

Hard as it may seem to believe, India was not modeled on the US. On the whole it has dealt quite well with its diversity of languages and cultures. If that is too hard to imagine, perhaps you can try imagining Europe.

Here's the thing:

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.

But why? All that does is handicap the people who don't speak more than 2 dialects, even though they may be more productive in terms of work than the people who speak 22 dialects.

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.

What's the problem with keeping the accent? Why do you think an accent hinders you?

And which language and universal accent should the world switch to?

>What's the problem with keeping the accent? Why do you think an accent hinders you?

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.

Language is important to people who aren't you. Your notions of what is and isn't important are personal, not universal, and you really don't have the right to dictate to people that they're no longer allowed to speak a certain language simply because it's not the one you picked.

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 don't understand how the analogy is related? Yours is cruel beyond people's feelings.

No need to be arrogant, I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal. Indeed, I only talked about myself in that comment, precisely to avoid peppering it with IMHOs.

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.

> I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal.

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/

Protip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto

> 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.

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.

Not ambitious enough. Let's have English as the one-and-only language for the entire world. All your arguments are applicable for this too.

/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.

But which English??????

> I think India needs to adopt an archive and extinguish policy with its many regional languages

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)?

Archiving languages is necessary for linguistics' sake. God knows we'd love to have at least some form of written attestation for most ancient tongues.

I think he was referring to "archive and extinguish policy".

Yes, it's obvious why archiving is a good idea. I'm interested in knowing why someone thinks that extinguishing a living language is a good idea.

> Archive and extinguish

Should this be applied to Europe also? Should Germans, French and Italians all drop their languages and convert to English?

Another Northie idiot showing his intellectual shallowness - you do not understand how Language and Culture are central to Identity. Any way, how about teaching BiMaRU idiots writing in Hindi, once your Hinterland accomplishes 100% literacy(most likely never), we can talk.

You are as bad as that guy. What has region got to do with intellect? I am from North India, from the home of the Buddha. Are you really basing your argument on those grounds?

Online regional Indian spats are always entertaining.

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.)

Your comment strikes me as hilarious because I don't speak or understand Hindi. I'm from South (probably like you), and the only languages I speak/understand are English and Malayalam.

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.

I wish I could downvote this comment. Regardless of the merit of your argument, you are reducing HN to the level of YouTube comments with your angry diatribe.

You may want to make your points without making personal attacks or bad generalizations.

> First, archive -- record the language, its linguistic structure & features for science's and posterity's sake.

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?

this is not a thing that we can do.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8

> See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGtP6ZQ6Lt8

Wrong link? This video has to do with healthcare. (I didn't watch the whole thing though.)

Somewhere in the middle they talk about creating iOS apps in-situ to archive and teach going-extinct native languages. Pretty neat.

Just because you think india has too many languages, does not mean everybody should speak Hindi. If you think that is a good argument why don't we push it further and just use English for everybody. All the educated people know it anyways. It should be much easier to promote than Hindi. that seems bad, doesn't it? To let go of Hindi?. Well it feels the same to us from the south India.Please don't try to rub your half baked ideas on us.all this is on a good day.

On a bad day I will find you and kick your ass, call your mom bad stuff in my language for saying that.

What is your fascination with Hindi. Why only Hindi?

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?

Spoken like a true armchair ignoramus. I dont think you neither realize the strong language oriented identity India nor the diversity in the language construct that you club in the "north indian" or Hindi bracket. Though Indian languages share a common ancestral vocabulary grammar can be quite different. So the assertion that hindi will be easy to pick up for all north Indians let alone north Indians is quite hilarious. Anecdotal evidence is not data but consider this ,I am a north Indian and my girl friend and her family speaks hindi (so I have enough reasons to be good at it) but I am way more comfortable in english than in hindi, inspite of the fact that my primary education was in hindi rather than in my mother tongue.

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.

Do you even see what you've written before you post on the intertube ? This is Hacker news for god's sake !

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.

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