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smalltownrifle 5mo ago 💬 12

Language is a politically charged issue in India. Union govt preferably wants people to learn and speak Hindi in the name of decolonization. While state govts preferably want the language of the respective subcultures in their jurisdictions in the name of cultural preservation.

And yet, English - spoken by probably 10% of the population - remains the language of supreme and high courts, formal contracts, laws, legislations and regulations.

Neither levels of govt really stress the importance of people learning English.

Food for thought.

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Discussion

Bitcoin Sikho 5mo ago

I keep hearing the word homogenisation and the push to make hindi the preferred language for everyone in India

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

Who is doing the pushing though?

Because I don't think homogenisation of certain areas is ever going to happen.

Bitcoin Sikho 4mo ago

The state as far as I can tell

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

The government does allocate a few dozen crores each year to promote select languages, predominantly Hindi. To what effect, I don't know.

But you can be sure that they won't stop spending because of the ruckus it will cause (same goes for budget allocation to every other department).

So, the leeching will continue for a long, long time. For every perceived 'issue', you'll have a set of voters, drunk on fiat-fueled debt, holding the entire country hostage for every Rupee taxed and spent on 'solving' it.

MAHDOOD 4mo ago

Language holds a lot of human relationships back. I often wonder if the world will gravitate to one language over time on a bitcoin standard. It certainly seems that way in the sovereign individual. And my guess is that the language would be English, not because America is the strongest, but because programming languages use it. It seems like the most reasonable standard.

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

I don't think we're going to converge on one language though.

The future is going to be way too local for that to happen, since I think big states are unsustainable and will collapse under their own weight.

MAHDOOD 4mo ago

The reason I think we could is because people will be traveling around to different jurisdictions that are competing for their bitcoin. So people will learn the language that is most recognized around the world.

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

Could very well be a language that links people, yep. It already is to a great extent hahaha

I'm a content writer by profession and English puts more sats into my wallet 😂

But there are billions like me who would keep interacting using our native tongues with other speakers of them. Like there are some languages which are integrated into people's lives and culture to such an extent that they won't ever die out. My language, Tamil, is one of them.

MAHDOOD 4mo ago

There seems to be a strong incentive to learn the most common, and closest thing we have to a universal language, as a form of communication. I’m sure there are fewer English speakers in your country’s previous generations than there are in your current generation and in the next generation. As long as that incentive remains, I think they will gravitate toward that language. Time will tell.

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

Depends on the region you're looking at. Big cities obviously have a lot of English speakers. And some states like mine, Tamilnadu, have a higher percentage of English speakers than the others. Generation-wise, yep. More now than before.

Anyways, the point I was trying to make in OP was that govt education sucks in informing people about natural rights, constitutional rights, liberties and the legal system. Because the medium of instruction in govt schools are not in English.

Either the legal, administrative and judicial system ought to switch to local languages. Or public education ought to switch to English.

I'd rather have the languages switched *and* have the education system completely privatised and deregulated both at the same time.

MAHDOOD 4mo ago

The government is incentivized to keeping the population ignorant so it makes sense they’d do it that way. I’d like everything to be privatized but I’m just an extremist 😂

smalltownrifle 4mo ago

And reg tendency to gravitate towards a single langauge:

Depends on what area of life we look at.

Cultural areas like music, news, media, religion, movies, art, literature will always be local languages no matter how much one tries to change it.

Professional, economic and business requirements may require people to learn English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. depending on who the person is economically interacting with.

Legally and politically, yeah. There could be a tendency for one universal language to emerge. English has by far the best chance at getting there because of the advancements and scholarship that has been made using this language.