I live in a multilingual nation. But we have no national language rather have 2 official languages i.e. Hindi and English that are used for the Parliamentary proceeding, Judiciary and to communicate between the Central Government and State Government.
There are 22 officially recognised languages in my country and more than 1500 languages and dialects are spoken here. My mother tongue is Odia and along with that, I speak two dialects. In schools, English is taught as the second language. Most of the people understand Hindi as India has a big Film industry and most of the Movies are made using Hindi language, so most of the people can understand it even if they can't write it or speak it well.
So far I can speak Odia, Hindi and English plus two additional dialects and the learning is still going on:) By the way, after coming to this place, I knew that the hunger for learning language is an amazing feeling. People, those are learning different languages other than their native languages are really an inspiration for me to learn and know about other languages:)
Thank you, <a ng-if="discu.creator_obj.allow_profile" ui-sref="user({id:discu.creator_obj.id})" href="https://www.italki.com/user/1235251" class="" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); outline: 0px; outline-offset: -2px; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">J. Ríos</a> for a nice topic.
Part 2
All things considered, this nonsense could have been resolved
by simply making Ukrainian and Russian official national languages.
So.
What I wanted to say is this. For some years I haven't been watching
any TV and listening to the radio. You know, there is mostly sensation
terror news and brainwashing mish-mash of talk shows and political shows.
Disgusting.
And so now, despite all the governmental effort, I,
and almost 99% of people in my home town (second biggest city in
Ukraine), speak Russian in everyday life. I ended up speaking and using
English even more than Ukrainian, that I use only to read some
literature and write official documents.
That's my story of how,
in my personal case, government, trying to forcefully make everyone
monolingual, ended up making 1 man multilingual, but not the way it was
planned.
Thanks for listening.
Anyway I want to tell a little story about me getting into this strange world of being able to speak 3 languages, all things considered.
Part 1
I was born in USSR and in the school I was learning Ukrainian and Russian in equal proportions.
After that governmental formation kicked the bucket, thanks to geographic happenstance, I live in Ukraine. Almost every person In Ukraine with some exceptions in the western part of the country (Where Ukrainian is more common), can clearly understand Russian and Ukrainian and also speak serviceable Russian/Ukrainian. Hell, there are radio and TV shows where two hosts speak 2 languages at the same time, one language per host. Whatever.
During the whole period of Ukraine being an independent country we had only 1 official language - Ukrainian (for some reason). Russian was considered, as a language of national minority (Hey,politicians, national minority yourself!). Reading this you should take into account that back at the time and even now Russian was, and is, a native language for approximately half of the Ukrainian population.
And now thanks to the ludicrously, marvellously stupid government policy Russian is being eradicated and actively brainwashed out of out Ukrainian people's culture and minds effectively trying to make Ukraine monolingual, witch is, of course the most prominent demonstration of obvious linguistic discrimination amongst people. Russian schools are being closed, Russian speaking people are actively shunned in some parts of the country, and for some radicals even specking Russian in their presence becomes a mortal offence. Well there are many examples.
