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by kyllo 4676 days ago
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.
3 comments
dragonwriter 4676 days ago
> 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.

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newsign 4676 days ago
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 ....

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redditmigrant 4676 days ago
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.

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newsign 4676 days ago
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 ...
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kyllo 4675 days ago
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.
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