Two days ago I was
talking with a few of my friends and they asked me if my mother tongue was
Hindi. I told them that Hindi is not my mother tongue. They were confused and
asked me that since I am from India, the language I speak should be Hindi. It
was then I realized that most people think that Hindi is the language of India.
I decided that I should explain to all about what India is. Hindi is the
largest spoken language of India, but it is spoken by only 250 million people
of the 1.2 billion people of India. There are other languages like Bengali,
Marathi, Gujarathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu, Parsi, Punjabi,
Assamese, Manipuri, Konkani, etc. There are 30 official languages but there are
more than 1000 dialects. So for example if you move from one state to another
you cannot expect people to speak the language you speak. It is like this you
move from Virginia to West Virginia or North Carolina, people will be speaking
different languages. The same way most people think that India is a Hindu
country. Again this is totally wrong. India is predominantly a Hindu nation.
But you still have a lot of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians,
some local native religions, Jews, etc. So you meet a lot of people from other
faith too. So, to give you an example, we had a Muslim President with a Sikh
Prime Minister, a Christian Defense Minister in a nation of predominantly
Hindus. The dance forms also vary from state to state as languages differ. So
what is unifying India? To be frank there is no unifying or common thing in
India other than the feeling of Indian among the people. This characteristic of
India is unique. The thing that unified Germany was their race and language,
the French their language, and each country has always had its own unifying
feature except India.
That's pretty awesome that India is so diverse. I had no idea that it had so many different languages as well as accepted religions. It sucks that most people make those ignorant assumptions, but it's cool that you're able to enlighten them X)
ReplyDeleteWow India is very diverse! That must make it hard to communicate to someone you don't know. I wonder why there isn't a single language that takes the overwhelming majority. I also wonder why English isn't big there. I know they were colonized by the British, so the British would have made them learn English right?
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