India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years

http://www.nagalandpost.com/ChannelNews/National/NationalNews.aspx?news=TkVXUzEwMDA0MzUwNA%3D%3D-6GjDb5vmb0k%3D

by skbohra123 • 13 years ago

54 81 13 years ago

tariqr• 13 years ago

Consolidation FTW.

winter_blue11• 13 years ago

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.

realrocker4• 13 years ago

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.

unethical_ban• 13 years ago

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.

varunsrin• 13 years ago

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_...

alphakappa3• 13 years ago

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)?

Vlaix• 13 years ago

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.

anuraj7• 13 years ago

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???

seiji4• 13 years ago

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.

winter_blue11• 13 years ago

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.

sremani• 13 years ago

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.

realrocker4• 13 years ago

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?

seiji4• 13 years ago

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.)

winter_blue11• 13 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.

alphakappa3• 13 years ago

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.

zorpner• 13 years ago

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?

seiji4• 13 years ago

this is not a thing that we can do.

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

primelens5• 13 years ago

    > 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.

winter_blue11• 13 years ago

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.

nileshtrivedi3• 13 years ago

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.

saraid2165• 13 years ago

But which English??????

PhasmaFelis• 13 years ago

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.

winter_blue11• 13 years ago

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

arjie• 13 years ago

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.

mitchty• 13 years ago

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.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

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

enupten2• 13 years ago

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.

abc_lisper• 13 years ago

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.

srean• 13 years ago

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.

petilon• 13 years ago

Archive and extinguish

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

kamaal3• 13 years ago

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?

ommunist• 13 years ago

India had always been rich in languages. And I observe that from one side it is loosing few forest tribes dialects, many people in India are gaining solid knowledge of C++ and alike languages from the other side. Although I must admit, both tendences are very regional by nature. Is the world becoming poorer for that? I do not know.

ellicottvilleny• 13 years ago

Most of these languages should die. The purpose of a language is to unite groups of people. India's native languages are enmeshed in thousand year old (and older) ethnic, religious and regional ruts. Hindi is not important in the Tamil regions. Nor is Hindi or Tamil important in some other provinces of India. All educated working people will be speaking English plus whatever language they want to speak, and nobody outside or inside India needs to venture any opinion otherwise, as that's the global norm these days. English for business. Your own bloody business what you speak at home and with your friends, and your family.

lignuist• 13 years ago

Language diversity is a power tool against electronic mass surveillance.

batguano• 13 years ago

I am amazed and humbled to hear that India has 880 languages.

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.

anuraj7• 13 years ago

Well - India has 22 scheduled languages which are used as official languages and enjoy high level of development owing to state patronage. Each of these languages are spoken by more than a million people. Besides India has close to 800 unlisted languages which do not get the level of patronage that is required and is facing slow extinction. Some of these languages are spoken by less than 1000 people today and are in danger of imminent extinction. Unless we document and preserve them, a large chunk of human history and wisdom shall be wiped out with out any hope of claiming them back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India

test001only2• 13 years ago

May seem like boasting, but could not resist! Indians if they have finished schooling can speak at least two languages - English and their local/native language. Some of them in the south learn Hindi also, so it comes to three languages - most of the colleagues I work with fall under this category. Also Indians are pretty good at picking up new language if the move to another state in the country for work. I for one know five languages Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, English and Kanada.

India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years

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