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How to count every language in India (2018)

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Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#4
There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi.

Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language.

Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya etc.

Hindi is not even oldest language in India. It's Tamil.

The politics behind promoting Hindi is a religious one. It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system). This is the reason the religious party and organizations(BJP, RSS) promotes Hindi and forces in to the education of all non-hindi speaking states too.

Another misconception is all north indian states government administrative language is Hindi, which is not the case.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#5

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

> The politics behind promoting Hindi is a religious one. It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system)

You lost me there. Usual white man's burden speaking. BJP is not a "religious" party in any sense of the word. Hindi is just ridiculously popular language mostly because of Bollywood. Since most politicians tend to be 'hindi' speaking they try to make Hindi even more popular as it benefits them where as regional parties see that as threat.

Stop drinking Equality Lab's kool aid.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#7

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

> The politics behind promoting Hindi is a religious one. It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system). This is the reason the religious party and organizations(BJP, RSS) promotes Hindi and forces in to the education of all non-hindi speaking states too.

Rest of your comment is factual, except not sure if Tamil is the oldest language or Sanskrit or some other is.

But the above quoted part of your comment is utter BS.

The reason to promote Hindi is nationalistic rather than religious. Why should the lingua franca of any country be a foreign language, it should be a local language. Hindi fits the bill amongst all other Indian languages is because it has the largest footprint and hence best odds of success, as opposed to say Tamil which is primarily spoken in 1 state.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#8

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

This is just nonsense. Hindi has nothing to do with caste system. Hindi was promoted because of the need for a common language for a nation with 300+ official languages (not counting the dialects) - as it's the language that is most commonly spoke and understood. It's again absolutely nonsense about BJP/RSS. In the recent times the only party that worked for the poor/lower castes/class is BJP. Most regional parties works for the dominant upper castes and congress further discriminated against the dalits/STs during UPA2 with their legislations (and always been the party of upper castes + muslims and christians).

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#9

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

> It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system)

Not sure how Hindi is related to the caste system. Caste system plagues all of India irrespective of the mother tongue.

> forces in to the education of all non-hindi speaking states too

Education is a state subject in India, the union government cannot force a language on a state

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#10

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

> The politics behind promoting Hindi is a religious one. It makes convenient to promote the varna system(modern caste system).

As someone with some knowledge around this subject, this is a simplistic and inflammatory bad-faith reading of a very complex topic – how do you create a common country out of hundreds of splintered cultures, languages, and religions spoken by millions of people? The nearest parallel to how many languages India is the European Union, and I would wager that given the differing scripts and such, India's diversity of languages exceeds that of the EU's.

And people have been trying to unite this complex mixture as a country since the 1700s! (thinking of the British attempts here; much earlier if you include pre-British empires).

The imposition of Hindi has been the one of the (failed) ways to have such a common language. It is quite a vast topic, but one example is that Mahatma Gandhi himself started the South India Hindi Outreach Institute to promote Hindi as a means of integration between (broadly speaking) North and South India.

Also, the issue of caste in India is a pretty complex one as well, but having spent some time in south India, I can confidently say that casteism is way more prevalent there than Hindi, which casts some doubts on the effectiveness of the politics you allude to (even presuming it exists).

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

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