Languages of India

> You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other.

Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form.

> And when you ignore vocabulary...

That's the crux of my point. The punjabi dialects vary mostly in phonetics and not so much in vocabulary. In my case Gujarati and Lisan ud Dawat aren't exactly mutually intelligible in spoken form and most def not in their written form. As for Hindi-Urdu, it is mutually intelligible when in its hugely popular Hindustani [0] form, which is what your saying as well, I think.

> I don't think it differs grammatically from everyday Urdu either, with the possible exception of ezafe.

That's one difference that has Perso-Arabic tilt to it. The Urdu/Rekhta literature has other elements [1] that diverge from high Hindi that it couldn't possibly pass off as the same language as Urdu, imo. Exhibit A: https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals Most native Hindi speakers would have trouble parsing through most of those Urdu ghazals, I'd reckon.

> At formal and literary levels, however, vocabulary differences begin to loom much larger (Hindi drawing its higher lexicon from Sanskrit, Urdu from Arabic and Persian), to the point where the two styles/languages become mutually unintelligible.

Exactly. For a language like Lisan ud-Da'wat spoken by a much less number of people, there's a common ground with Gujarati which is simply to speak the main language Gujarati itself, even if the core vocabulary and grammar are similar between the two. The only thing working for Hindi-Urdu mutual intelligibility, imo, is that Hindi is spoken by a large number of people who are exposed to Urdu, on a day to day basis, and vice versa.

I guess, like someone mentioned [2], 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759103

Drafts are made to get people talking about and changes are made as necessary. An example of that is the Net Neutrality draft that was changed radically. Even the "Free basics" program which was part of the initial draft and was removed in the final policy.

These are drafts made at committee level that shouldn't be taken seriously. Only after the Government vets such drafts and puts out a call for "public opinions" would the the draft be finalised into a policy. The State Governments basically preempted the Government's intention. This is what is dangerous. If the State Government starts cornering the Central Government over committee level drafts then it creates a situation where the Government wouldn't even make public any draft policy fearing backlash. Instead have patience and see what the Central Government does with the drafts. All policies go through a call for "public opinion" and until and unless all issues related to public opinion are not taken into account it won't be finalised into a policy.

Again, use of language as a way to signal group identity and block out others is not "misuse" of a language. It is an inherent part of the human language faculty, it is normal usage. I know that in a venue like this who many participants are developers or sympathetic to the software community, there is a tendency to think of human language like a programming language, as solely a means of communication, purely a matter of "utility", but as I said, that is not how human communities actually work.

As for “irrational hatred”: considering the danger that large languages supported by a central government can pose to regional languages – a danger illustrated by numerous case studies all over the world – the desire of certain South Indians to avoid Hindi is not irrational at all.

The only daftness in this process was that the entire Government machinery had to be put in force just to allay the fears of one State over a committee's draft policy.

If this sort of reactionary response becomes the norm, then the Central Government will just stop publishing draft policies on their websites and instead wait until the final draft is ready. I prefer that as we have too many emotional people in the country who have no patience to wait for the final draft.

Let's just agree to disagree and move on.