[qntm]

> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. (Today, India has 57 non-endangered and 172 endangered languages, each with multiple dialects – not even counting the many more that have died out in the century since My Fair Lady took place)

So, how many were there really? At the time, I mean.

[pc2g4d]

I believe the number of "dialects" named in My Fair Lady can be largely explained by the lack of clear distinction between language and dialect over the years. From [1]: "There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference."

Getting upset about Henry Higgins's estimation of the number of Indian "dialects" in a play from many decades ago doesn't make sense to me. His character was deliberately portrayed as a regressive lout, and terminology has surely changed in the intervening years.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#Dialect_or_language

[chris_wot]

It also doesn't make sense to criticize the Unicode Consortium for an inaccurate quote from a playwright who wrote a play a century ago.

[rpedroso]

I think the numbers are somewhat disputed. The People's Linguistic Survey of India says there are at least 780, with ~220 having died out in the last half century.[1] The Anthropological Survey of India reported 325 languages.[2]

The discrepancies are made particularly tricky because of the somewhat ambiguous distinction between languages and dialects.

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/09/07/india-speaks-780-l...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=VjGdDo75UssC&pg=PA145

[qntm]

So, this person thinks there are 229 languages in India, but actually there's a minimum of 325, possibly twice that?

[rpedroso]

I'm not an anthropological linguist, so I can't say with any authority. I only listed two figures there, but there are many more disputed figures.[1] There are a lot of difficulties classifying languages in India because the line between language and dialect can be tricky to pin down.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India#Inventories

[CWuestefeld]

The meanings of "language" and "dialect" are surprisingly tied up in politics. Aside from what various folks in India speak, consider...

In China, too, we say that people in different regions speak different dialects: the national standard Mandarin; Shanghainese; Cantonese; Taiwanese; Fukanese; and others. Someone who speaks only one of these languages will be entirely unable to speak to someone who speaks only a different one. I'm friends with a couple, the guy being from Hong Kong and the girl being from Shanghai; at home, their common tongue is English. So in what way can these different ways of speaking be considered mere dialects?

But on the other side of the coin, there are the languages of Sweden and Norway. We like to call these different languages, but a speaker of one language can readily communicate with a speaker of the other. Wouldn't these be better considered dialects of the same language? I was recently on vacation in Mexico, and at the resort there was a member of the entertainment staff who came from South Africa, a native speaker of Afrikaans. She told me that she recently helped out some guests who came from Dutch, and spoke poor English (which is usually the lingua franca when traveling). Apparently Afrikaans and Dutch are so close that she was able to translate Spanish or English into Afrikaans for them, and they were able to understand that through skills in Dutch. Again, Afrikaans and Dutch seem to be dialects of the same language (and, I think, Flemish as well).

I think the answer is that language is commonly used as a proxy for, or excuse for, dividing nations. So if you want to claim that China is all one nation, you have to claim that those different ways of speaking are just dialects of the same language. Conversely, to claim separate national identities for Norwegians and Swedes, we have to say that those are different languages.