Live data from Hacker News

Does India need its own vernacular internet?

techinasia.com

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#21
post #12

Am I the only Indian who thinks this is not such a bad thing, prefer one language to unite us all (isn't that the common base for most far-future novels?), don't care which, I can converse in three Indian languages, and know bit of french. In Sweden, all that knowledge is useless, all the main sites are in Swedish, now I am learning å,ö,ä, guess how much fun I am having?

> prefer one language to unite us all

Its not a bad thing if that happens properly. But instead currently we have small number of 'elite' people who always prefer English over native language and we have large number of people we don't know how to read & write English. Since the output(business/knowledge/tech) of this 'elite' group almost always in English and by definition they are in control its not easy for person who don't know English to break loop. Its very easy for the person who know English to get the job compared to who don't. One might say, just learn English and become the 'elite'! Well, learning English is not at all easy for a kid from rural background. This initial barrier dividing among ourselves and now we now have invisible class system based on language. this is apparent if you visit any restaurants/supermarket in cities or just visit city outskirts. My point is process of implementation of single language for all is very difficult.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#22
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficul…

> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…

> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.

Sure, until you need to figure out which of the four phonemes a letter corresponds to which is very difficult for foreign language learners of Hindi, as it can be for English. I am a native English speaker but I picked up Devanagari in a day or so because it's actually relatively consistent due to the phonetic syllabic nature.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#23
post #11
post #2

(Vernacular - "Language of the slave"). It's far more complicated that "need its own vernacular internet". The internet is an emergent thing, and what one sees are just the symptoms. This is also the reason India's literacy is so low (even compared to Africa/Middle East). If India wasn't a linguistic apartheid regime, we'd already have seen a native ecosystem which is lacking quite badly. This needs fixing at the sta…

Great points you made. Agree with the fact that Swarachakra is too crowded and huge scope of improvement there. Also agree that the root of problem lie with education and state policies. But even with the huge push that english gets in this country, the reality is more than billion people don't understand it. This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet. Didn'…

> This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.

Perhaps, but to paraphrase a comment in the attached thread, I'd be more worried about feeding the cow before milking it. I mean, for a linguistic population comparable to native English speaking population of the entire world, there exists not a single school teaching Engineering of Medicine in Hindi (not to speak of other far older languages) - these people barely have any money to subsist on on average (and arguably also why medicine and infrastructure suck).

Also see,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZwq4JnCZ4A

http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#24
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficul…

> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…

> They type in Hindi

Not sure the majority of Indians speak Hindi either.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is.

Latin doesn't have a "J".

Classical Latin doesn't, and also variation around 'u'/'v'/'w'.

The "English alphabet" is _a_ Latin alphabet, however - cf. ISO basic Latin alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_basic_Latin_alphabet

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great points you made. Agree with the fact that Swarachakra is too crowded and huge scope of improvement there. Also agree that the root of problem lie with education and state policies. But even with the huge push that english gets in this country, the reality is more than billion people don't understand it. This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet. Didn'…

> This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet. Perhaps, but to paraphrase a comment in the attached thread, I'd be more worried about feeding the cow before milking it. I mean, for a linguistic population comparable to native English speaking population of the entire world, there exists not a single school teaching Engineering of Medicine in Hindi (not to spe…

Completely agree with you on this one. The situation is much more worse than what we living in a bubble imagine. The video really touches your heart. Reminds me of a couple of my friends in my college, and the struggle they went through - Shifting from one language to another.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#28
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficul…

> majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? They won't. They type in Hindi, using the roman alphabet. Big difference. If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari Apparently SMS is big in India: > SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provid…

> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.

Actually, you're just arguing that the input methods for Latin are simpler (and I agree). Devanagari is superior in almost every respect to Latin alphabet, from phonetics (in पाणिनी) to arrangement - it can be entered as easily with IMEs - the lack of which is an indication of the state of things.

To put this in perspective, if Indians were using logographic characters like China/Japan, the current input methods would be akin to old Chinese typewriters.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#29
Fantastic article. I'm not Indian, so I apologise for my ignorance - but I would have liked to have read a bit more under the 'education' heading.

I would (this is where I fear I may be ignorant of the truth) assume that there is perhaps a rather strong correlation between money/education and English-fluency?

With that premise, it would seem that those with the power to effect change (educated engineers and entrepreneurs) are less incentivised to do anything about it - since they're presumably able and content to use "the English-language internet".

I suppose money can be the motivator though, if there's ~0.9*1.2B people clamouring for more internet in their native tongue.

I am trying to learn Hindi, so having read this I think it'd be interesting to toy around with pan-alphabet internationalisation when I've got a bit of a grip on it.

Re: Does India need its own vernacular internet?

#30
post #29

Fantastic article. I'm not Indian, so I apologise for my ignorance - but I would have liked to have read a bit more under the 'education' heading. I would (this is where I fear I may be ignorant of the truth) assume that there is perhaps a rather strong correlation between money/education and English-fluency? With that premise, it would seem that those with the power to effect change (educated engineers and entrepren…

Thanks OJFord. Under education, I tried to highlight a few short term opportunities for indian startups to focus on. From K 12 education to college education, all technology solutions have been built only for English speaking users.

There is no mobile based learning app for students to learn Math in Hindi language. No test prep platform in Hindi/Bengali or any other language (there are tons of test prep apps in English) No employee training or certification providers provide their online platform in any regional language. Not even an LMS exits (to be fair not many regional language medium institutions would be willing to pay for one) There is no Khan Academy in Hindi language.

As per the second point, yes I believe that should be true. Its not necessarily true that these non-english speakers don't have propensity to pay.

Post reply on HN