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Question for people from India


Czarownica

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Since we have a few people from India active on this forum, I'll use this opportunity to ask a question that's been on my mind for a while :)

India has a lot of official languages and even more languages that are not official, but are still commonly used. My question is, are these languages similar at all? I mean, if a person knows one of those languages, is it easier for them to learn other languages used in India?

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I'm not from India but my understanding is no.  I have a close friend from the North who says the languages in the south are indecipherable to her.  Hopefully someone actually from the country can elaborate.

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I live in a country where various Indian languages are spoken by the descendants of immigrants who came in the 19th Century. They mainly speak southern languages like Tamil but there is a small minority  from Punjab and what is now Pakistan.

The languages to the north of Goa are all Indo-Aryan, meaning that they are very distantly related to the languages of Europe! These include Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Pujabi, Bengali and even Nepali. The Southern languages like Tamil and Malayali are not related to the Northern ones at all.

The differences between the North and the South are similar to the differences between the Swedes and Finns or the Austrians and Hungarians, meaning that  they share a long history together and have some similar customs and even borrowed words from each others' languages but ultimately their languages are of completely different origins.

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It depends really what part of the country the language is from. For example, I am from the north-western part of the country and only have absolute command over Hindi but I can understand bits and pieces of most of the languages of the region. This includes languages like Punjabi which has a completely different scrip from Hindi. There also some 20-30 local dialects in regions like Rajasthan, UP and Bihar which I can understand fairly well.

The trouble starts when you go away from a region. Bengali is very different from Hindi but there are a few words used there which have common origin with the Hindi words, so a Hindi speaker may get a general idea of what is being spoken but not the specifics. Oriya being a language spoken in regions closer to Bengal is very similar to Bengali.

The southern languages are almost completely indecipherable to North Indians. But someone speaking Telugu will not have a lot of trouble with Kannada because they are spoken in neighboring states.

In a nutshell, it all boils down to geographical distances really. There are of course a few exceptions.

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A fellow Indian here. Yes, learning and comprehending a language becomes somewhat easier, when you have already learnt a related language. For example, you can easily learn Bhojpuri if you know a bit a bout Angika language.

But with more than 5,000 languages spoken in our country, some languages are altogether different than other languages

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I totally agree, my best friend is Tamil and he says that he can't understand a word of Hindi! It's very commonly  spoken in Malaysia to the extent that any Malaysian who says that he or she is of Indian origin would be expected to able to speak Tamil!

Spoken Tamil is very rapid and uses a lot of shortened sounds that make whole phrases sound different from how they are written.

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