[kamaal]

>>I find it hard to process this claim.

I think me means dialects. Which many times can sound very different. During my first semester engineering we had a electronics lecturer who came from North Karnataka. They speak a fairly different dialect of Kannada. When I heard her talking for the first time, I was quite startled to see that some thing like that would also mean Kannada. In Bangalore we have our typical street slang Kannada, heavily overloaded with English words.

Same is true of Urdu as well. Even the Dakhani Accent has so many varieties, some times it could sound strange hearing some one speak Urdu in Bangalore, then Tumkur and then Mysore(All districts close to each other).

[vinayms]

I am pleasantly surprised to see Kannada and Karnataka mentioned. I am a Kannadiga from Bengaluru. As for street slang of the city, don't ignore the copious amounts of Urdu loan words!

As you might already know, the case with Kannada is more complex. Firstly, it has high amount of diglossia. Even with all the unnecessary, flowery Sanskrit loan words removed, the spoken form is greatly different from the written form. Next, the spoken language has many many regional variants, as with most languages in the world. Further, the spoken language varies according to social groups aka caste within the regions. One could even attempt to find variations based on economic status, aka rich to poor scale, but as an amateur linguist I don't find anything particularly noteworthy to hold such a classification, and, if anything, the variation is mostly confined to the tone of speech (not same as being tonal) and a bit of inflectional oddities rather than vocabulary. In modern times, the rich tend to use more English words which muddles the matter further. Beyond all this, there are about half a dozen languages that are identified as child languages of Kannada that are mostly associated with tribal groups living in forests and mountains. I guess this kind of diversity is expected of a language which is in continuous use for nearly two millennia.

For those intrigued and interested by this, I can't give any references on the internet beyond the wikipedia page because Kannada and Karnataka are severely underrated and underrepresented in Indian historical scene. Any work of worth written in English belong to the colonial times, with 1930s being the latest. The information in this post comes from knowledge acquired by reading books published, in Kannada, by language departments of universities of the state and the literary organization, and others are from personal experiences.

[kamaal]

While I was in US one Arab told me something similar about Arabic.

Apparently if your language isn't used for economic, science or to say activities that advance the state of world affairs, your language stagnates. For example, you would run out of words to describe something like a Lorry/Truck. So you start naming it on the basis of number of wheels. Like for example you would call Auto Rickshaw as ತ್ರಿ ಚಕ್ರ ವಾಹನ. The literal translation comes down to three wheeled vehicle. But it sounds strange to say it that way. So you just say 'Auto', a loaned word from english.

So you end up borrowing a lot of words from other languages if the worldly state of affairs aren't getting invented in your language.

And yeah, the other part is spot on. Kannadigas aren't very assertive of their identity. As a language Kannada is >2000 years old. There are countries on earth today which didn't have a written language back then. And then of course with such a long history you also get a lot of literature.

[nielsole]

> Not dialects. Languages.

It doesn't get more specific than that. He/she means languages