[newsign]

India is also in similar situation where many dont speak Hindi - its like a Britain or American cant speak English ... being multi dialect/language country shouldn't be an excuse of not being able to speak the national language - i guess past and present government is to be blamed...

[singlecomment17]

LOL, I'll bite.

The second sentence is a fallacy: it's NOT like a Britisher or American not being able to speak English. It's like a Spaniard not being able to speak Italian. Before unification each part of India was its own political entity.

Also read up on the debates in the constituent assembly. There were heated debates on the topic of Hindi as "national language", "only language" etc.

Also, I am pretty sure you are not aware of this, but the national education/language policy of the 1960s said that Hindi speaking areas will learn a non-Hindi language in school in addition to English. The so-called three-language formula of 1968.

It might be worth reflecting on why the three-language formula is not being adhered to.

[singlecomment17]

Related: http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/official-lang... "Official language or national language?"

And: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-25/india... "There's no national language in India: Gujarat High Court"

[kyllo]

That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.

[dragonwriter]

> That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.)

> Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.

Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.

[newsign]

Also those people are purely native speakers, meaning people whose first language is Hindi - while there are many whose command over Hindi is very strong but their first language is Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc.

If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes way over 500 Million ....

[redditmigrant]

Hindi is the native language of 180 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi), most of who live in India.

While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.

[newsign]

Artificial language? :) it is not a language cooked in someone's kitchen :-) it was widely spoken before independence - though Sanskrit would have become more acceptable ...

[kyllo]

The thing about languages is that they are constantly changing from generation to generation. Any official attempt to standardize a language effectively fossilizes it, and the disparity between the standard and the actual language that people actually speak, will grow greater and greater over time. And then if you're creating a standard for a large dialect region, the effect is even more exaggerated. So the standard is actually highly artificial--just through the process of standardization, you are artificially creating a language that no one actually speaks natively.