Miriam
The Beauty of Indian Languages
India is a linguistically very diverse country and home of some of the most spoken languages in the world but in the language learning world only Hindi plays some role (a minor one compared to European languages) and languages with hundreds of millions of speakers like Punjabi and Bengali are completely overlooked, not to speak of lesser known Indian languages. I'm currently not actively studying an Indian language but I've taken some interest in Odia, Telugu and Gujarati because I know native speakers of these languages in my town (and that is always a motivation for me to learn a language or at least to learn about it) and I'm fascinated by the various scripts and learnt the Devanagari script just because I got annoyed by not understanding a meme in Hindi.

Want to get a glimpse of Indian languages? Then watch these videos:
Jabra song by Shah Rukh Khan in Hindi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4_szl5EEww" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4_szl5EEww</a>; (with English subtitles)
A mashup of the same song in 11 languages (Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, Odia and Sinhala): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bqK7698cuw" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bqK7698cuw</a>;.

Let's discuss Indian languages! Are you a speaker or learner of an Indian language? What's special about it? Why should people study this language?
8 nov. 2019 07:33
Commentaires · 29
3
India is a diverse country in many ways. One can visualize it as both chaotic and colorful. And that depends on how someone wants to see it. Some may generalize it as cow, caste, and curry, where as others may get lost in its dense diversity.:)
Talking about languages, I think it may look fascinating to others that India is a home to many languages, but for Indians it may not be a big deal. Apart from their native langues, they mostly care about one more language, which they call their second language i.e., English.

I think Som gave an informative explanation about Indian languages including the linguistic dividend between the North and South India.
Talking about Urdu and Hindi, I perceive them as a pizza made up of similar ingredient but with different topping. Urdu has a topping of Arabic and Persian whereas Hindi has Sanskrit.:)
8 novembre 2019
3
A little bit offtopic, but I love Indian and Pakistani music.
@Som
So nice crazy baul songs
Abida Parveen, the woman with the best voice in South Asia

India is a treasure trove for languages. English as well belongs to India, in several 'forms and shapes'. I was once in Kerala and there were just 2 hotels, one expensive one and a cheap one, where only Indians were allowed to stay. I went to the cheap one and tried my bad Hindi. I told them I was from Ludhiana in Punjab, 3000 km north of Kerala. After a successful check-in (my name was Isvar Singh) he asked when I wanted to check out. I said 'eleven' in Hindi and he said to me 'please don't use English. So I said 'eleven' in English and he shook gently his head from right to left (a custom apparently absent in Pakistan but national treasure in India) and said 'thik hai', allright. I love India!
8 novembre 2019
3
I would predictably be the first here. Bengali is my MT, Hindi the adopted MT and therefore also Urdu which is not really that different. Linguistically, India can be separated into the Southern (Dravidian) group and the Northern group that comes directly within the Indo European family. The Dravidian languages are much older and quite different from the IE family languages. Tamil is perhaps the oldest, and Malayalam is somewhat similar. Likewise Telugu and Kannada are similar. There is even a fair amount of mutual intelligibility between these pairs but not necessarily between them. All of them also have a ton of Sanskrit loanwords.

A similar case applies to the eastern language cluster, technically in IE family including Bengali, Assamese and Odia. However, there are significant other influences like Tibeto Burman and the local tribes (<em>adivasis</em>) such as Santhali, and in case of Odia it's from Telugu (neighboring states).

Where north and northwest India are concerned, Hindi has many dialectic forms but the standard version is what I mean, and this includes Urdu. These are pretty close to Punjabi and Haryanvi, though most would say the latter a hybrid of Hindi and Punjabi. One can also understand fair bits of Marathi and Gujarati, and Rajasthani is yet another variant of Hindi. There are other hybrid classes such as Konkani (spoken across much of the west coast) which has similarities to both Marathi and Kannada, Malwani which is similar and Tulu, which is rather different.

This still leaves out many, like the ancient tribal (<em>adivasi</em>) languages found in my region: Santhali, Mundari, Ho and Kurukh (Oraon), and also the kaleidoscope of Tibeto Burman languages that prevail in north east India: the Khasi, Garo, Mizo, Nagamese and Manipuri variants. These are all isolates unrelated to IE or Dravidian, with intelligibility only for their own or related speakers. Broadly speaking, there is little cross intelligibility between the various groups that I describe.
8 novembre 2019
2
Adam Standard Hindi and spoken Urdu are actually quite similar and quoting Wikipedia "According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, Urdu, along with Standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt (as Hindustani), is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with approximately 329.1 million native speakers, and 697.4 million total speakers"
8 novembre 2019
2
People should learn Urdu because of its sophistication and the beauty of its literature. There is an emphasis on politeness and respect in this language. I am not personally learning any Indian language but Gujarati and Kashmiri sounds fascinating. Mainly because I have students, friends and neighbors who are Gujarati.
8 novembre 2019
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Miriam
Compétences linguistiques
Chinois (mandarin), Finnois, Français, Allemand
Langue étudiée
Chinois (mandarin), Finnois
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