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0 pointsqart4y ago0 comments

Hard coercion did not work in India. They are doing pretty serious strong-arming now. Want a job in the central government? Gotta know Hindi. A lot of money is getting poured into Hindi promotion schemes. Hindi is definitely a dominant language now. Native speakers just assume everyone else in India will just play along. There was a minor scandal last year when a customer in Tamil Nadu was mocked by the customer service rep of a food delivery service. That particular issue got resolved, but Hindi hegemony remains.

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akg_674y ago

In central government, there need to be a common language for communication. Which one would you prefer? Two primary choices seems to be either English or Hindi.

I recall talking to an Indian woman, who was doing PhD Engineering in Japan, on this topic couple of years ago. Her take was very interesting when I mentioned that more and more decent jobs in India require command of English and if this trend continues, the Indian languages will go extinct. Her response was it is just part of evolution, cultures, languages are just part of that evolution.

qartOP4y ago

English. Easy choice. I prefer a simple two-language formula for all official communications in India. Local+English. There are plenty of languages that English is swallowing up. They are mostly in UK itself. Like Gaelic, Welsh, etc. Not any Indian language.

Hindi is swallowing up languages too. All those languages are in the so-called "Hindi belt". I am not all that concerned about either English or Hindi replacing other local languages. My bigger concerns are legal and economic hurdles placed by Hindi imposers. I'm OK with teaching and requiring English though. Because whether they like it or not, English has become the world's language of knowledge. Especially in computer science. Ruby was developed by a Japanese person, Lua by Brazilians, Python by a Dutch, the Linux kernel by an ethnic Swede. And yet, the best documentation for these is in English.

I'm not an English fanatic. If I were around a few centuries ago, I would have advocated Latin. A couple of millennia ago, I might have advocated Sanskrit in India.

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