Why do some South Indians can speak Hindi fluently while many can't?

[Muloghonto]

15 minutes ago, Nikhil_cric said:

There are Marwari, Sindhi communities in Bangalore too. And even the parents end up learning Kannada for business transactions even if the kids had to take Kannada as 3rd language and many didn't do it either. But they still ended up learning the language so I'll have to disagree there. 

 

5 % in India is 70 odd million.  We'll need a linguistic revolution to even get to that figure

The number of Indians who can speak a few words of Sanskrit is higher than 70M. Remember, back in 50s, the jewish literacy rate for Hebrew was less than 1% for what would be considered ESL level, nevermind first language fluency. 

There is nothing to disagree on, since its actually an objective fact that the majority of Indians who have literacy in a second language have obtained it through school system, not by just picking it up. 

 

[Mariyam]

1 hour ago, Muloghonto said:

Given that South Indian languages have 10-30% loanwords from Sanskrit, these are splitting hairs. 

Grammatically, Hindi and bengali are significantly different, since Bengali grammar does not have gendered pronouns ( we dont say 'he is going to the market'. we say 'o market-e-jacche'. The 'o' is applicable to man,woman,child,oldie, etc. 

Related to the same language family doesnt make your grammar the same, it means you have loanwords from a common source. Lithuanian is related to Hindi, but that doesnt mean a hindi speaker will have any real advantage learning Lithuanian than a Tamizh. 

 

I've had a rather strange experience with directions asked in Hindi to native Bengali speakers. Once in Mumbai and once in Kolkata.

 

When told " agla left" most of us would assume that they meant the next left turn, but in both instances  they meant the previous left turn.

Extremely

[Muloghonto]

4 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

I've had a rather strange experience with directions asked in Hindi to native Bengali speakers. Once in Mumbai and once in Kolkata.

 

When told " agla left" most of us would assume that they meant the next left turn, but in both instances  they meant the previous left turn.

Extremely

Thats because 'agla' in hindi means 'other/next' but 'agey' in bengali means 'before'. 

Hingali is usually bongs thinking 'every word that sounds like bong word is gonna be bong word in meaning whether you like it or not'. 

One of my earliest childhood memories is living in Delhi as a 5 year old and my mom going to the market ( usually it was my dad who did) with me, looking for poppy seeds, which is called 'posto' in bengali. She didnt know what it was in hindi and kept saying 'psssst paaaaaaast pppppppst' and the shopkeeper dude said ' behnji, aap seetee mar rahee ho ya kuch bol rahee ho ?'

 

Edited October 3, 2024 by Muloghonto

[BacktoCricaddict]

My viggest provlem bhith Vengali is bhere to say Ba and where to say va.

 

A for apple, B for Bictory ...

[zen]

2 minutes ago, BacktoCricaddict said:

My viggest provlem bhith Vengali is bhere to say Ba and where to say va.

 

A for apple, B for Bictory ...

 B for Begetable

 

[Muloghonto]

8 minutes ago, BacktoCricaddict said:

My viggest provlem bhith Vengali is bhere to say Ba and where to say va.

 

A for apple, B for Bictory ...

There is no Va or Wa. Its always Ba. We dont say 'wah wah' , we say 'bah bah'. 

 

follow these few simple rules for transition from Hindi pronounciation to Bengali and you will be fine 99% of the time:

 

1. Except for start of a word, replace every 'a' and most 'i' sound with 'o' sound

2. replace all V with B sound ( its not Vishnu, its Bishnu)

3. Replace all F sound with Ph sound. Its not 'fool' ( flower) in Bengali, its 'phul'. 

4. Turn every S into a Sh. (its not sanskriti, its Shonshkrito)

 

 

Edited October 3, 2024 by Muloghonto

[zen]

 

 

[bowl_out]

46 minutes ago, zen said:

 

 

 

In Tamil Nadu, it is F for flatform or fuffs 

During my childhood, I thought I was pronouncing it wrongly as platform when all the uncles around me said flatform ticket

[coffee_rules]

5 hours ago, Nikhil_cric said:

I have already watched those movies and no that first example is not even close to being sufficient 

 

Those are just synonyms for the same thing. Elevator is used even in India. And apartment too.

 

It may not be used commonly in Canada.

 

But I'm talking about the ability to intuitively understand another language without significant exposure to that language. 

 

For example, Assamese people intuitively understand Bengali although it's probably not true the other way around. 

 

Malayalis can intuitively understand Tamil even if they're hearing it for the first time. 

 

That gap is much further apart for Southern languages from Hindi at least the spoken versions. 

 

Literary versions are almost useless because what we need, if any, is a functional language for business and communication. 

 

Most people learn when they are in an environment of necessity and where they hear a language a lot. 

 

 

FOB stories. My manager in US kept laughing when I said I need to go to the petrol pump.  Open the bonnet or  dickie and you will find spare tire! India gets all Brit words. 

 

Edited October 3, 2024 by coffee_rules

[coffee_rules]

5 hours ago, Muloghonto said:

Also i dunno if this happens to the southern languages, but Bengali, like Hindi, has extreme dialect diversity, where some dialects are simply incomprehensible to us. 
The Bengali i speak/Bengali that is taught in schools is actually Rahr-bangla dialect, which is similar to Khariboli dialect of Hindi. 
However, if someone speaks to me in Chattogram bangla or Sylheti bangla, someone like @coffee_rules will have similar luck at understanding them as me. 

 

Of course there are accents in Kannada land also in other languages of the south. A person growing up in old Mysore will have it tough to understand the Kannada of North Karnataka , the idioms, phrases and the way some words are spoken is totally different. I grew up in NK as well, so it is not a problem for me. But I doubt it will betotally alien like youexplained about Vangali. 

[coffee_rules]

1 hour ago, bowl_out said:

 

In Tamil Nadu, it is F for flatform or fuffs 

During my childhood, I thought I was pronouncing it wrongly as platform when all the uncles around me said flatform ticket

That is in Kannadigas as well. They mix up fa and pa and also Ha or Aa. But my pet peeve of Tamilians is they mix up Da and da . They pronounce Modi as Mo-Dee and for India they say In-thee-ya. In any case,  Mo-dee should rejine saar!!

[coffee_rules]

4 hours ago, Mariyam said:

 

Very interchangeable in regular usage. Lots of people use the word.

 

Also, under Islamic jurisprudence, Yateem is someone who has lost his/her father. 

There are Islamic charities which pay for the education of children who have lost their fathers. It is quite telling that, if a kid were to lose his/her mother, no Islamic charity would fund the education. Or if they do, those are extremely rare.

 

Anath is a person who has lost both his/her parents.

 

That is extremely lazy.  Before Bollywood became what it is, no one was speaking a Sanskritized Hindi across the length and the breadth of the country. Perhaps a handful, and mainly those in literary circles. 

 

I don't consider Hindi/Urdu as different languages. Just different scripts for the wider Hindustani language. And a 'purity' scale that goes from heavy usage of Sanskrit to heavy usage of Persian. Most speakers of this tongue are somewhere in the centre of the scale.

The erudite ones are able to slide across from one end of the scale to the other with ease.

What do you call a kid who has lost parents in Urdu?

 

Although khadi boli or common language is in between Sanskritized Hindi vs Urduized Hindi, early and even now Bollywood writers were Muslims like Sahir, Shakeel, Kaifi and the language had heavy bias towards Urdu words in songs. The Sanskritized Hindi vanished away due to the linguistic colonization of Persian in Hindi. Bollywood soft power ensured that and even Sanskritized Hindi was made fun of. Can you imagine a song like this now?

 

 

Edited October 4, 2024 by coffee_rules

[Muloghonto]

50 minutes ago, coffee_rules said:

Of course there are accents in Kannada land also in other languages of the south. A person growing up in old Mysore will have it tough to understand the Kannada of North Karnataka , the idioms, phrases and the way some words are spoken is totally different. I grew up in NK as well, so it is not a problem for me. But I doubt it will betotally alien like youexplained about Vangali. 

 

Well, yes, there are idiomatic differences in all the dialects i know of, even in English, as well as different accent - thats usually the first mark of a dialect. 

But what i meant is, in Hindi there are dialects like Maithili/Bhojpuri and in Bengali there are the Chattogram/Sylheti dialects, which are not like the other dialects, that are like you describe above - i dunno the idioms, the accents are different, its much like going to Scotland and getting scottish accent and slangs and idioms thrown at you.
But those dialects, its like a totally new language. except for some words like 'i/you/me' etc. almost ALL words = incomprehensible. 

And its not just my people's accent that finds Chattogrami/Sylhethi incomprehensible - just like its not just the Khariboli hindi speakers who find Maithili/Bhojpuri incomprehensible - pretty much ALL other dialects of Bengali feel the same way about Chattogrami/Sylhethi and same for Hindi.

I wonder if there is anything like that in southie languages, because most languages, dialects are like in English = you may have difficulty understanding the accent and idioms but if you asked them to speak slower/properly, you will get it. While if i ask a Chattogrami to speak slower, its just slower gibberish. 

 

[Muloghonto]

57 minutes ago, coffee_rules said:

FOB stories. My manager in US kept laughing when I said I need to go to the petrol pump.  Open the bonnet or  dickie and you will find spare tire! India gets all Brit words. 

 

Well i went to british high school in middle east for my final 2 years before university, so i picked up the british lingo when i came here. The worst FOB moment is when you ask for a cigarette but use the british slang 'fag' for it. 

TOTALLY the wrong thing in north american english and people get SUPER offended if you say 'hey u got a fag i can bum off of ya, mate?' 

 

[Muloghonto]

5 hours ago, Mariyam said:

 

Any business offering services for those activities listed as essential cannot and should not be permitted to run, if they can't offer services in Kannada.

Most essential services are under the State List. De Jure they have to offer services in the local language.

On that there is no difference of opinion.

 

Dr Ambedkar and the others who jotted down the constitution "suggested" to the various states at the time to add English as a state language. Prescient suggestion, as it turned out. So most States have English also as a State language and are forced de jure to offer services in English also. The notable exceptions are Odissa and Pondicherry.

Thats not prescient suggestion, thats the suggestion of a colonized mind, taking orders from his white master as he was drafting the constitution. People forget that most Indian freedom fighters were like Nehru or Gandhi or Naoroji - they wanted to kick the British out but keep the Britishness in India. There are very very few heavyweight freedom fighters, like Netaji or Vallabhai Patel or RB Bose who saw through the whole 'keep english/ keep british institutions'  as nothing more than proxy rule by the british via their mentally colonized 'indian revolutionaries'. 

 

Thanks to BR Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru and those mentally colonized midgets, Indian culture and strategic scene is readily penetrated by the whiteman, poking their nose into each and every local issue and finding legions of gungadeens to peddle their nonsense wokism, thanks to penetration of English. 

Which you will see, doesnt happen nearly as easily in Taiwan or Singapore, Japan, Korea, etc. because they dont speak english very well and pick it up as needed and as their economic history shows, they dont need mastery of english to get developed as a society- something that the anti-Hindi western bootlicker cabaal says is the reason English should be taught in schools in India. 

 

 

5 hours ago, Mariyam said:

I don't consider Hindi/Urdu as different languages. Just different scripts for the wider Hindustani language. And a 'purity' scale that goes from heavy usage of Sanskrit to heavy usage of Persian. Most speakers of this tongue are somewhere in the centre of the scale.

The erudite ones are able to slide across from one end of the scale to the other with ease.

 

Well you are wrong. Once upon a time, i could speak Urdu fluently, because my ancestors had links to Mysuru state admin and kept the Urdu literacy going. I never got around to reading it, but i could speak it. And if i spoke proper Urdu, 99% of people who say 'hindi and urdu are the same thing' wont understand more than 5% of the words i'd use. 

 

[singhvivek141]

10 hours ago, bowl_out said:

 

The disagreement from the South Indian states is that they see Hindi just as any other regional language. It has always been local language + English (the link language).

I have lived in Chennai and Bangalore through my childhood and never seen Hindi boards used anywhere except the yellow boards in Indian Railways. Now, Hindi creeping up in many places around the same time that there is massive influx of population from the North causes resentment among locals. 

 

You shouldn't see this as an isolated incident. The crux of the resentment is "Why should Hindi speakers be spoonfed everywhere despite already getting so many benefits that non Hindi speakers don't get".. Some of them include:

1. All competitive exams managed by the Central govt (CBSE, UPSC, Railways, Bank exams etc) are offered in Hindi or English... While Hindi speakers get the natural advantage of taking their exam in their mother tongue, others don't
2. Simple day-to-day things like Bank Challans, Customer service calls etc, are often in Hindi and English, and don't service even locals in their local language
3. Hindi belt is performing poorly on all socio-economic indicators, still most of the budget for everything gets allocated to them
4. Hindi belt has a TFI of ~3, whereas Southern states have <2, but resource allocation is done on population, so South gets dinged for doing well on the metric
5. When Non-Hindi speakers from other states don't have the convenience of being served in their language at the Bangalore metro, signs on the highway, banks etc, why should only Hindi speakers get the benefit?
6. The added annoyance of not having an even footing - A kannadiga needs to learn Hindi when he travels North, but he also needs to alter what he displays on his sign boards to make sure that a Hindi-speaking person feels welcome when they visit.

 

Lastly, despite all of this (and many other reasons not listed here), our PM and HM parroting time and again that "Hindi should be the national language" or "Everyone should learn Hindi" or promoting Hindi Diwas using taxes from non-Hindi speaking states frustrate them even more leading to exaggerated protests from pro-local-language groups. Obviously some protests are over-reactions.

If you look at the protests in isolation, it would look stupid, but you need to see them in the context.

 

 

The usage of Hindi in competitive exams used to be an advantage till 90's/00's..but the gap is shrinking now.

With the opening of more and moreEnglish schools, kids who are born after 00 don't know many Hindi words, they may still be able to read...but forget the writing & more importantly understanding part. As the Hindi written in academics and Hindi spoken in day to day life varies a lot. So Hindi will become useless in exams in next 30 odd years. 

 

Give or take 30-40 years and you will see new bunch of kids who will just use Hindi or any other regional language as a secondary means of communication (primary will be English). These kids may still be able to speak their local language, but will struggle to read and write. The phenomenon has already started in metro cities, will take few decades to impact Tier 2 cities as well.

 

Now, problem with scripts in Bank Challans is Hindi's script Devnagri is used in Marathi, Konkani & to some extent Gujarati as well. While in Southern states, every state has it's own language which is written in a different script. So even if you learn how to speak, reading & writing will be next to impossible task, and we all know it's literally impossible to embed every script in Bank Challans (I don't think anyone even reads the scripts written on Bank notes). 

 

Lastly Hindi belt struggling, I guess there are some historical & other factors which I will not speak off as it will take discussion elsewhere. But non access to sea port is one of the primary reasons. That's where the Western India & South have an immediate advantage. North courtesy of it's rivers has an advantage in agriculture, but that's not sufficient to generate the income which you can get through ports.

[singhvivek141]

8 hours ago, Mariyam said:

 

Very interchangeable in regular usage. Lots of people use the word.

 

Also, under Islamic jurisprudence, Yateem is someone who has lost his/her father. 

There are Islamic charities which pay for the education of children who have lost their fathers. It is quite telling that, if a kid were to lose his/her mother, no Islamic charity would fund the education. Or if they do, those are extremely rare.

 

Anath is a person who has lost both his/her parents.

 

That is extremely lazy.  Before Bollywood became what it is, no one was speaking a Sanskritized Hindi across the length and the breadth of the country. Perhaps a handful, and mainly those in literary circles. 

 

I don't consider Hindi/Urdu as different languages. Just different scripts for the wider Hindustani language. And a 'purity' scale that goes from heavy usage of Sanskrit to heavy usage of Persian. Most speakers of this tongue are somewhere in the centre of the scale.

The erudite ones are able to slide across from one end of the scale to the other with ease.

In this context, that kid had lost both of his parents, so calling him "Yateem" was a mistake anyway. More so coz it came from a temple priest who don't use this word in North...it was just a poor writing.

 

What I meant to say was, that South is unable to recognize Hindi coz of the usage of these Persian/Urdu words, they are more familiar with Sanskrtized words...anyone in South will immediately recognzie the word "samudra" vis-a-vis "samandar". 

 

Also Bollywood is known for their lazy writings.. in the Super 30 movie, Hrithik Roshan used the word "ka hoi gawa" as a Bihari sentence...it's not the way a Bihari speaks in any sense. Either either "ka ho gail" or "ka ho gaya".

 

Ka hoi gawa is a mix up Khichdi of Mathura, Lucknow & Varanasi dialect.

[Nikhil_cric]

4 hours ago, coffee_rules said:

FOB stories. My manager in US kept laughing when I said I need to go to the petrol pump.  Open the bonnet or  dickie and you will find spare tire! India gets all Brit words. 

 

Yep. Traditionally , we used British words/expressions a lot more. Even slangs like "bugger" and "porky fellow" which as a kid I used I thought had more local origins .

 

[singhvivek141]

3 hours ago, Muloghonto said:

Thats not prescient suggestion, thats the suggestion of a colonized mind, taking orders from his white master as he was drafting the constitution. People forget that most Indian freedom fighters were like Nehru or Gandhi or Naoroji - they wanted to kick the British out but keep the Britishness in India. There are very very few heavyweight freedom fighters, like Netaji or Vallabhai Patel or RB Bose who saw through the whole 'keep english/ keep british institutions'  as nothing more than proxy rule by the british via their mentally colonized 'indian revolutionaries'. 

 

Thanks to BR Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru and those mentally colonized midgets, Indian culture and strategic scene is readily penetrated by the whiteman, poking their nose into each and every local issue and finding legions of gungadeens to peddle their nonsense wokism, thanks to penetration of English. 

Which you will see, doesnt happen nearly as easily in Taiwan or Singapore, Japan, Korea, etc. because they dont speak english very well and pick it up as needed and as their economic history shows, they dont need mastery of english to get developed as a society- something that the anti-Hindi western bootlicker cabaal says is the reason English should be taught in schools in India. 

 

 

 

Well you are wrong. Once upon a time, i could speak Urdu fluently, because my ancestors had links to Mysuru state admin and kept the Urdu literacy going. I never got around to reading it, but i could speak it. And if i spoke proper Urdu, 99% of people who say 'hindi and urdu are the same thing' wont understand more than 5% of the words i'd use. 

 

I myself didn't know meaning of words like Shamsheerein, Dastarkhan, Lahol villa kuwat, siasat, vatanparast

 

I learned meaning of vatanparast only when in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Nawaz translated as "desh bhakt".

Edited October 4, 2024 by singhvivek141

[singhvivek141]

6 hours ago, bowl_out said:

 

In Tamil Nadu, it is F for flatform or fuffs 

During my childhood, I thought I was pronouncing it wrongly as platform when all the uncles around me said flatform ticket

I think even "Tha" or "थ" sound isn't there in Tamil.

Dhanush said in an interview that speaking Thappad word was a challenge for him as this sound dont exist in Tamil..so he was saying it as Tappad. He had to undergo lot of retakes just to pronounce that word right.

 

Similarly in Marathi there is ण्णा sound, I have a hard time pronouncing it. But for Marathi folks it's business as usual.