FluteHolder wrote:http://www.thehindu.com/thread/arts-culture-society/north-india-needs-to-resist-imposition-of-hindi/article19401960.ece?homepage=true


There are a bevy of languages spoken in different pockets of the country's northern regions that are fallaciously subsumed under — as dialects of — Hindi. Hindi, as it is assumed to exist, is really the language of Delhi and surrounding urban centres.

Acceptance of local languages will enable creation of material in the ‘true’ mother tongue. Eventually, the effect will be positive. The false identity of Hindi sub-nationalism ought to be done away with. It is an idea that has outlived its purpose.

Ponniyin Selvan wrote:

FluteHolder wrote:http://www.thehindu.com/thread/arts-culture-society/north-india-needs-to-resist-imposition-of-hindi/article19401960.ece?homepage=true


There are a bevy of languages spoken in different pockets of the country's northern regions that are fallaciously subsumed under — as dialects of — Hindi. Hindi, as it is assumed to exist, is really the language of Delhi and surrounding urban centres.

Acceptance of local languages will enable creation of material in the ‘true’ mother tongue. Eventually, the effect will be positive. The false identity of Hindi sub-nationalism ought to be done away with. It is an idea that has outlived its purpose.

Yes, Hindi has killed or is killing many languages of North India.

It is a big conspiracy to take a language spoken in and around Delhi and make all other different languages of North India as dialects of Hindi. Around 50 different languages are subsumed as Hindi to pump up the number of speakers. 

Knowledgeable folks cannot be fooled anymore.

southindian wrote:Yes, English is killing most languages in India and in the world and my mother tongue is destroyed by English every day.

Ponniyin Selvan wrote:

southindian wrote:Yes, English is killing most languages in India and in the world and my mother tongue is destroyed by English every day.

Now, what is your mother tongue?. 

Is it subsumed under Hindi and called as a dialect?.

Ponniyin Selvan wrote:You are not answering my question since you know the fact that it is Hindi that is killing your mother tongue. 

Even though English is killing all the languages slowly, at least we still have our identity left. But it is quite unfortunate that Hindi is not even allowing that liberty to other North Indian languages. 

Why don't you come out in the open and say your mother tongue. Is it one of the 50 languages being killed by Hindi?.

Idéfix wrote:We had a southern Indian poster on old CH who liked Hindi imposition and thought of it as a way of "integrating" India. That same deeply-flawed idea was successfully propagated in the north during colonial times by nationalists seeking to unify the country. Seventy years of government policy and Bollywood further damaged the linguistic diversity of the north.

Idéfix wrote:We had a southern Indian poster on old CH who liked Hindi imposition and thought of it as a way of "integrating" India. That same deeply-flawed idea was successfully propagated in the north during colonial times by nationalists seeking to unify the country. Seventy years of government policy and Bollywood further damaged the linguistic diversity of the north.

Ponniyin Selvan wrote:Why don't you come out with your mother tongue and prove my assumption is not true. ?

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:I've heard of one theory that all the Northindian languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi etc are just Prakrit variants that only got differentiated as separate languages in the last three or four or so centuries.  In the time scale of Dravidian languages and the time they've had to evolve and become recognized as separate and distinct, that's a blink of an eye! So why privilege a particular recent Prakrit over so many others?

Idéfix wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:I've heard of one theory that all the Northindian languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi etc are just Prakrit variants that only got differentiated as separate languages in the last three or four or so centuries.  In the time scale of Dravidian languages and the time they've had to evolve and become recognized as separate and distinct, that's a blink of an eye! So why privilege a particular recent Prakrit over so many others?

Do you remember the source for this? That sounds like too short of a timeframe for such a range of differentiation. My understanding is that there was a fair amount of distinction between languages like Awadhi and Maithili going back many centuries. As a fluent speaker of modern Hindi, I could easily understand Kabir but understood almost nothing of Surdas, although both lived about 500-600 years ago. So the differentiation between say Marathi and Khariboli, or Bhojpuri and Bengali, which are more pronounced today, would likely be rooted further back in history.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:

Idéfix wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:I've heard of one theory that all the Northindian languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi etc are just Prakrit variants that only got differentiated as separate languages in the last three or four or so centuries.  In the time scale of Dravidian languages and the time they've had to evolve and become recognized as separate and distinct, that's a blink of an eye! So why privilege a particular recent Prakrit over so many others?

Do you remember the source for this? That sounds like too short of a timeframe for such a range of differentiation. My understanding is that there was a fair amount of distinction between languages like Awadhi and Maithili going back many centuries. As a fluent speaker of modern Hindi, I could easily understand Kabir but understood almost nothing of Surdas, although both lived about 500-600 years ago. So the differentiation between say Marathi and Khariboli, or Bhojpuri and Bengali, which are more pronounced today, would likely be rooted further back in history.

Let me see if I can find a different the original article. I remember reading in the same article that Bengali is older, but with marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi the differentiation occurred much more recently.

Not a definitive reference, but for now:
http://aboutworldlanguages.com/gujarati

I'll try to find a more well sourced reference. One thing that strikes me is that there is much deeper and more voluminous research on the linguistic evolution of Dravidian languages than on the modern descendants of Prakrit. The problem may well be the lack of well-dated literary texts.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:Why is there so little linguistic research on Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Hindi? Where are the Bhadriraju Krishnamurthis, the Kamil Zvelebils, and the Robert Caldwells of Gujarati linguistics?

If you search the existing linguistics research on the Indian subcontinent it's as if there is only Sanskrit and then the Dravidian languages. No scholar seems to have any interest in studying the linguistic evolution of the other languages.  Strange!

Idéfix wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:Why is there so little linguistic research on Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Hindi? Where are the Bhadriraju Krishnamurthis, the Kamil Zvelebils, and the Robert Caldwells of Gujarati linguistics?

If you search the existing linguistics research on the Indian subcontinent it's as if there is only Sanskrit and then the Dravidian languages. No scholar seems to have any interest in studying the linguistic evolution of the other languages.  Strange!

Yeah, it is strange. Around the world, a lot of things about language are intensely politicized, and I suspect northern Indian politics and the fetishization of Hindi as "national language" contributes to this lack of research.