This reminded me of a video I saw once, many years ago. It was told by the last speaker of a language - from a tribe in El Salvador, iirc (Central America, for sure). Most of his tribe had been wiped out during civil war. He and his parents were the last living speakers of their language. When his parents died, he was the last. The video was a long, tearful poem, telling the story of his people and their destruction. Of course, no one could understand a word of it but him, but the emotion was unmistakable.
It's interesting that the same technologies we use to preserve language (audio/film/text) are also largely the reason for their destruction. If you just have two people talking with each other in the woods there aren't any economies of scale, no 'best' version of Wikipedia, no Hollywood movies to watch, etc.
I don't know, languages have been dying out for a lot longer than those technologies have been around. Languages die when the cultures who speak them either get assimilated or eradicated; I am not sure what technology has to do with that?
Before the printing press, there was dramatic variation in regional dialects of European nations. After the printing press, standardization and state centralization have been grinding these regional dialects into the ground. Even traditional regional languages like Irish or Scots Gaelic are going extinct.
I live in a city with tens of thousands of east African immigrants (mostly Somali). It's fascinating to me, to hear the difference between how the adult Somalis speak, and how their children speak. The teenagers, having grown up here, speak in perfect, accent-free English. Will their children even speak Somali at all?
(As an aside, I totally love my little window into Somali teenage girl culture, just from riding the train and sharing a neighborhood with them. Their fashions are incredible, and they're so energetic and happy. Somali teenage boys, on the other hand, are just as glum and faux-cool as teenage boys everywhere.)
This is how integration works, when it does. The parents might stick to their own country-men, but over time the children will be raised in the local-schools, speak the local language, watch the local TV, etc, etc.
This is a myth. You mean they speak your local accent of English.
> (As an aside, I totally love my little window into Somali teenage girl culture, just from riding the train and sharing a neighborhood with them. Their fashions are incredible, and they're so energetic and happy. Somali teenage boys, on the other hand, are just as glum and faux-cool as teenage boys everywhere.)
Please don't be racist. Appreciate people without making convoluted assumptions about how their race and gender causes their behavior
It seems more likely to me that compulsory education conducted entirely in a "national language" is the culprit here. How many of these stories involve "we were beaten for talking in $LANGUAGE at school"?
Thanks to a college professor long ago, I'm firmly convinced that technological advancement is the main reason cultures get assimilated/eradicated. Or more to the point, new cultures rise with new technologies, and wipe out the previous ones.
Along the same lines as my original comment and the source of this story, one of the most educational nights of my life was a lecture by a visiting professor from India. His research took him to the most remote villages, villages that had never experienced electricity before. He recorded their music, because the moment radios and tape players arrived, the local music was basically obliterated. And he felt guilt and shame, because while he was preserving it, he was also the nose in the tent - the first time they ever experienced recorded music.
When you say "obliterated", doesn't it really mean that people in these villages liked the music from the radio more than their local stuff? Why label people's preferences with such dramatic words?
>> people in these villages liked the music from the radio
It could also be because
(a) the low cost and availability of music on the radio (portable, on demand etc) was much higher than the availability of their native music which had to be played live by an artist.
(b) the novelty of the 'outside' music or its sophistication due to the electronic instruments used etc could have temporarily make the local people to like the outside music long enough to stop making their own.
Even in India - the few members of animist religions in the nort east often feel poorly when having to deal with the more advanced religions like Christianity/Hinduism/Islam - there’s a level of outreach, funding, polish, prep, conversion techniques and arguments - essentially human pleasing sophistication, that other religions just have not had the time or resources to develop.
You see similar things happen with food and fruits.
Along the same vein, worth checking out the archives of Alan Lomax. He spent 70 years collecting oral and folk music recordings across America, the Caribbean and the UK. Now in the Library of Congress[0]. Some of his recordings are famously sampled on Moby's Play album.
There are many stories similar to this one; wikipedia's list of last speakers of languages[1] is a good starting point for those interested in dying languages and the attempts at their preservation.
On a slightly related topic, India has a vast and rich set of languages and millions of people that speak/read/write these languages. With daily newspapers, tabloids, literature etc, I presume there is a (potential) huge corpus of rich data for each language too. And, I just read yesterday that India just surpassed US to become the second biggest mobile phone market.
Then why is there not more of NLP work/products on Indian languages? There's a market for it, a huge market, isn't it?
> Then why is there not more of NLP work/products on Indian languages? There's a market for it, a huge market, isn't it?
The market effects of linguistic diversity work both ways: having more languages increases the potential demand for translation tools, but the sheer number of long-tail languages also makes it hard to justify compiling a corpus and making a considerable effort to study each of these languages enough to build tools for them. Some language communities may almost completely lack the kind of highly literate people who would make this task surmountable, and those who could help, may already be working another more stable or higher paying job.
That may be the case for many people across the "Hindi belt" of northern India. (Hindi and Urdu, at an everyday level, being fairly close to a case of "same spoken language, different scripts".) In the Dravidian-speaking south....not so much.
No. People in the northern region would since it is similar to Hindi. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala have their own language respectively which is different from Hindi and they wouldn't.
I am not certain about entire Andra and Telengana. People in Hyderabad speak Urdu.
The current tools were created by generations of scientists and engineers; people that these linguistics communities lack. As some of them get educated in NLP and related fields, more resources and corpora will be build. But heck, even languages for which there is universities and labs working on it (plus EU funding) there is a huge gap. For example czech.
As a side nodes, some existing researchers who have an interest in other languages start work on them even if it’s not their native language. I know researchers who did that with african languages: by working with students speaking them, there is transfer of knowledge and preliminary work done. Mentoring the first generation of native speaker scientists is the key imo.
This is the reason I am teaching my mother tongue to my kids first, where every parents in my area wants their children to speak English first and that too in American accent. I understand that it's a global language but some cultural things are really difficult to pass on to your kids without your mother tongue
One more related link to the same story, Two episode podcast about languages in India. It talks about first survey conducted during British Raj and then Ganesh Devy ji's people's linguastic survey of India:
https://soundcloud.com/theintersection/31-mission-impossible...
> He discovered that some 16 languages spoken in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh have 200 words for snow alone
A know urban legend often applied to Inuits.
> Dr Devy, an untrained linguist
But we'll still call him doctor.
I'll guess he's a doctor in English? and they are there to entertain as he's done. (Obviously doctors in English can do other important things as well)
I don't know.... the BBC when they do these stories... intelligent people know they are not true buuuut then what does one think when they report on Syria.
Are stories like these symptoms and show we also should also take stories on Syria very very carefully or are they cancerous and encourage bad reporting and bad thinking? Are stories on Syria the same, just entertainment anyway and their accuracy for the masses is on equal importance?
I guess for me a source of truth is important and I would have though many on HN would want to seek the truth, but perhaps not so much.
[edit] There is also a interesting story here, I assume it's not a lie and the doctor believes what he's doing is true.... but I can't be sure from all the other inaccuracies.... but at face value he's done something really interesting that is BBC worthy. It just needs better framing.
> Hindu nationalism, on the other hand, is a current threat, desi_ninja.
Wholly agreed, I would add a nuance that Hindu nationalism as pushed by the current govt is. Their view is that the only Hindu religious way to be a practicing Hindu is the way it is practiced in a particular region in India, even the most devout practicing Hindu from the east (from a generation and further ago) wouldn't have heard/practiced about dandia, dhanteras, karva-chauth. There are regions where devout Hindus would have beef and not feel that they are flouting norms of Hinduism. The only right way to speak/write is in a specific regional language of India. A lot of governmental machinery -- executive and legal -- is being expended to achieve this monoculture.
I had a chance to visit one of academy he helped establish, adivasi academy(their domain name has expired), tejgarh, vadodra. I really liked how he played the role of catalyst in helping local people recognize their own culture and preserve it.
[Edit]: My bad for linking to the infested URL, didn't realize it.
" The "Mercury Text" font was not found.
The web page you are trying to load is displayed incorrectly, as it uses the "Mercury Text" font. To fix the error and display the next, you have to update the "Mozilla Font Pack"."
I find this ironical that the technology(in this particular case their site) which is considered as a savior for these languages and dialects, by archiving them, indexing them, can get itself rendered as something to stay away from instead of making this resource accessible.
The BBC has to get an anti-Modi (Prime Minister of India) jab in: "He worries about the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP's efforts to impose Hindi all over India, which he calls a "direct attack on our linguistic plurality". "
Various governments in Delhi, throughout history, have toyed with the idea of making Hindi the national language. It hasn't happened yet, and won't happen. But, of course, the BBC would like you to believe that Modi thought of it first.
I was objecting to a mischaracterization in the article. I took a literal quote from the article and objected to it; I did not make it up, or change topics.
I agree. It was not my intention to start a flamewar; but with all the talk about "biased RT", "biased Al Jazeera", etc. flying about, I wanted to point out how BBC also is equally biased, just not in the direction "we" would like them to be.
It's interesting that you take the phrase "efforts to impose Hindi" to mean an unprecedented attempt, because nowhere do they state that this is an original idea or the first such attempt.
Reading that statement, as written, it comes across as if the "ruling Hindu nationalist BJP" is trying to impose Hindi. There's no mention of other attempts in the past.
I am from Kerala (South India). Hindi imposition never bothered me until the last 2 years. I don't know if it's media's effect, but it is a really valid concern for me. Considering that Kerala exists more or less thanks to money from Gulf countries and little help from the center, I won't mind a separation either.
Why do you think that the BBC is pushing its own agenda here, rather than accurately quoting the concerns and views of the person that they are profiling?
I mean, it may be an attack on their linguistic plurality but the flip side of that plurality is that English is the de-facto national language rather than a language native to India. Not saying either viewpoint is more correct than the other, but I've heard both positions expressed.
Earlier governments, in general, weren't so vehement about language forcing. But this government is going too far with not only language forcing but also with cow worshipping, minorities hounding, history distortions, jingoism, suppression of freedom of speech.
that is just the BBC being BBC, i mean nothing short of a highly detailed analysis showing their bias against India would even change the image to a western crowd about an issue like this.
One of the main reason behind the 'developing' state of India even after 70 years of independence is its differences which Indians still have in their mind. The language barrier is the only barrier which is proving to be resistance let alone culture prevention and all that. Languages are just a form of communication between people and people should accept it. People should learn languages like English(Which have vast amount of resources available).As the growing trends suggest India will be the most populated country after 2020 and it will have around 70% of the citizens who will be youngsters. Believe it or not but sooner or later English will dominate(though i believe it's still dominating to bridge the gap between south and north india). In india you can't surf internet properly if you don't have any clue about English and india do have maximum number of smartphone users around the world and that will ofcourse help remove some sort of language barrier between people.
Also Modi do promote Hindi(though his mother tongue is gujarati) but I believe he does so because he finds himself more proficent orator in the language.
China is one more country which is preserving its culture by speaking chinese and i don't think anyone should stop someone to do so.Though it would be better if there is one unique language with which people should feel unity among themselves.
> China is one more country which is preserving its culture by speaking chinese
There's so many different languages spoken in China, many of which are dying or endangered. Moreover, China is by no means a mono culture. The government of China actively promotes a singular language and culture at the cost of those on the margins.
This doesn't even count situations where the written language is largely the same, but due to dialect differences the spoken version is almost completely different.
> China is one more country which is preserving its culture by speaking chinese
"chinese" isn't one language. It's a set of many languages which share some grammar and a common logographic script (though the script isn't used in exactly the same way for each, e.g. Beijing will write/say 哪儿 instead of 哪里 for "where?" -- there are many other differences but I don't know enough to give a clear idea of its scale).
The spoken languages are quite different otherwise, at least as different as European romance languages. There is a "Standard Mandarin (普通话)" however; which the government has pushed and is spoken by most residents of Mainland China.
I'm skeptical that this is a good way preserving the culture. If language does have an effect of preserving the culture; this move would also have effect of killing subcultures from regions (which may indeed have happened in China; though I don't know). China and India are both pretty diverse culturally.
You're making the argument that the popularity of English is detrimental to the preservation of Indian Culture and in the same breath suggesting forcing Hindi on everyone as a solution, as if it wouldn't have exactly the same effect on a culturally diverse country.
"chinese" isn't one language. It's a set of many languages which share some grammar and a common logographic script
I don't think that's true for any chinese languages other than mandarin and cantonese. I've been in Taiwan for the past few weeks and dipped my toes into Hokkien/Taiwanese/Souther Min, and the situation there is fascinating. In every day normal situations it's never written, if two native hokkien speakers want to send an email or text it will be done in mandarin. In the rare occasion Hokkien is written, it will be done haphazardly. Sometimes you'll choose a mandarin character that kind of means the same thing as a hokkien morpheme, and sometimes they'll choose the mandarin character that kind of sounds the same the same as a hokkien morpheme. Native speakers will be able to read this, but often struggle.
I have read that people used to be able to write Hokkien in characters, but that's lost now. I'm confidently told by native speakers today that the language has no written component (沒有文字). There's romanisation system that seems to be able to represent every sound prefectly, and more has actually been written in romanised hokkien than by any other methods, but Taiwanese people have a bit of a phobia of the latin alphabet, and no one uses it.
Yeah, I misspoke; I should have said "where some share a common logographic script".
But I'm actually unclear about this.
The weird thing is that certain dictionaries give pronunciations of hanzi in multiple Chinese languages (e.g. Wiktionary) including "scriptless" languages.
I've also seen cases in Taiwan where e.g. a restaurant name or place name is written in hanzi and English and the romanization is clearly not using the standard Mandarin pronunciation of the term. An example of this is 淡水 which is romanized "tamsui" in Taiwan but would be "danshui" in pinyin or "tanshui" in Wade-Giles. Syllables ending with "m" are not a thing in Mandarin as far as I know, and 水 is never romanized as "sui" (though I could chalk the 水 one up to an alternate local romanization system like POJ, which I don't know anything about).
Finally, I've also seen text in Taiwan with four-bopomofo ruby. From my understanding of bopomofo; for Mandarin you won't have more than three glyphs plus a tone mark -- the initial consonant, optional medial i/u, and optional final. This also gives me the impression that Min Nan can be written in hanzi. Unless Taiwanese Mandarin differs from Mandarin significantly in pronunciation (which may be the case, I don't know).
All this leads me to believe that other Chinese languages can use hanzi, but do so less often, perhaps? This is something I've always been confused about but never really looked into it.
You're bang on the money: Tamsui is a romanisation of the hokkien name, not the mandarin one. There's a few other non-mando names floating around, like Taroko (an aboriginal language).
I have a Taiwanese book for school children that includes the governments romanisation, hanzi, and some kind of extended bopomofo. While the native speaker I was learning with could read hokkien-with-characters, he couldn't do it quickly, and often had to puzzle over a certain character. In cases where they had both characters and romanisation I was able to help him on the characters he was stuck on by (badly) pronouncing the romanisation. Still, I haven't met any Taiwanese hokkien speakers at all interested in romanisation. Which is a shame - it covers all the sounds, and the language does seem to be slowly dying (the fact people don't write it probably has a lot to do with it).
Ah, so when I see a sign saying "淡水/Tamsui", the first one is in Mandarin and the second one is romanized Hokkien. I assumed they were both from the same language.
Though it seems like hokkien-with-characters is a thing (from what you say, and also from what I've seen with 4-bopomofo ruby and Wiktionary), just less prevalent. Or perhaps one can look at hanzi at the same level as romanization for Hokkien (except romanization is more prevalent), i.e. "someone else's script that kinda works for us so we use it sometimes"
So it's similar to the regional forms of Arabic in the Middle East. People will speak with each other using a dialect, but all official and educational writing is in standard Arabic. When people chat informally (e.g. on WhatsApp), they would typically use Arabic characters to build words that can usually only be understood by speakers familiar with the dialect in question.
The different chinese languages don't seem to be dialects in any objective sense. I have no idea how it started being called that in english (bad translation of 語/話 maybe?), but Hokkien and Mandarin seem about as different from each other as English and French, maybe more. No mutual intelligibility. What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there.
And that's the thing, they use characters when they have to write it, but even then native speakers struggle to read it because there's no commonly used standard way to do it. In practice, they just write in mandarin.
> What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there.
I call them dialects for lack of a better word. For example, an Algerian Arabic speaker would not be understood by an Egyptian, and a Kuwaiti Arabic speaker would not be understood by a Syrian, etc. Regional dialects may have an accent, but more importantly use different words and may even have different, informal grammatical rules.
When it comes to writing, everyone uses Arabic letters, but each region may write different words depending on the regional dialect.
The entry on Tunisian Arabic[1], which is my native dialect, may provide an idea on how it differs from other dialects.
Brazil never had this problem and it is still 'developing' 195 years after its independence. Same language, not that different regional culture (similar to USA I guess). And Europe as a whole was able to become developed despite its language barriers.
I think soneca's point was Brazil is still developing irrespective of any language barriers. So how does your statistics on PPP become an argument for that?
There lies a difference between 'developing' & 'developed' and my point regarding it is with the development pace which is comparatively slow against Brazil or any other developing nation which usually has very few language as an official one. Brazil has only one 'Portuguese' as an official language but India has far too many.
More and more I think many places would benefit from embracing two languages—the utilitarian/economic one and the cultural/human one. Regional diversity is a good thing, and certainly doesn't deserve to be sacrificed in the name of economic convenience, at least not as long as we hold human life to be superior to material assets.
Given that English is already fragmenting (just read a newspaper from Guyana) and with the example of the Arab language (watch an Egyptian try talking with a Moroccan - bring popcorn): I am not sure your advice is a good one. English, like every other language, limits what you can say to what can be expressed in it.
From personal experience, I'd rather recommend to dabble in as many languages as possible: Each new language so far introduced new concepts (of seeing the world, if you will) and forced me to break through the invisible barriers erected by the language I was raised with.
And, finally, if we need a "world language", can we please agree on French? I think it is so much more pleasant to the ear than English... and it saves those who already speak it from having to read "rsvp, please" ever again ;)
I think the French language as the one universal world language movement has failed. There was a chance in the 70's but business and the internet has forever changed that.
Promoting a language because the Prime minister finds himself more proficient orator in the language? I find that hard to believe. Do you have sources on this?
Yep, I doubt that's the reason. Modi is a Hindu nationalist, and promoting preeminence of Hindi over other Indian languages has been part of that agenda for a long time.
Folks push it because it's Indian and understood by most. Folks resist and protest because it's not their native language and somehow worse than having English everywhere.
> Folks push it because it's Indian and understood by most.
I don't ... dispute that? You're continuing with the non sequiturs and it's really hard to tell what point you're trying to make.
("most" is also "bit more than half the population", which isn't that compelling)
> Folks resist and protest because it's not their native language and somehow worse than having English everywhere.
You have not understood the resistance. People don't think it's "somehow worse than having English everywhere". There is no analogous push for English everywhere that people are not opposing.
The promotion of Hindi as the most important language in India is not limited to this Prime Minister or administration. It has a long history, starting from Independence in 1947, when the writers of the Constitution decided that English would slowly be phased out in preference to Hindi [1]. Unsurprisingly, foisting a foreign language on native speakers of Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and other languages was met with fierce resistance. In 1965, this policy was abandoned by the Union Government. Unfortunately, the Hindi speakers who generally dominate government never gave up this crusade. Every now and then they try something that will slightly push the boundaries of what people will tolerate, while not letting the the issue become too large.
Sneaky tactics of the last few years include
* In 2014, Modi decided that all social media accounts run by the government would communicate in Hindi, not English. [2]
* In November 2016, new notes were issued that had numbers in Devanagari for the first time in 69 years since Independence, rather than Arabic numerals. [3]
* In March 2017 mile markers in Tamil Nadu were in English and Tamil. Tamil was replaced by Hindi [3]
But this is not limited to this particular government. Previous governments have taken similar steps. Personal anecdote - I studied in an institution funded by Union government where all signposts were written in English and Tamil. This was replaced across the campus at great cost with signposts written in Hindi, English and Tamil. There was not a single person on that campus who didn't know English or Tamil or both, but the Union govt wanted to send a message anyway. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.
The sad part is that its not just about hurt feelings, as some Hindi speakers might characterise all of this. We are going down the exact same path as Pakistan did post Independence. They tried to force Urdu down the throats of the millions of Bengali speakers living in (then) East Pakistan. "Incentives" to learn Urdu effectively ended up discriminating against the Bengalis, leaving them disenfranchised. Eventually they couldn't take it any longer and declared Independence. I wish we could learn from history rather than repeating the same old mistakes.
[1] - http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17351.html (It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India)
Another story I heard from a colleague. Army came for NCC training to a school in South India. They asked the boys who don't speak Hindi to come forward. Then they made them do 100 frog jumps as punishment.
It's not just that. Ever since he has got his position he is trying to promote India's ethnic values and culture and he's not saying "Bhaiyo aur beheno bas hindi bolo" ( brothers and sisters just speak hindi) and nobody is imposing the language hindi on anyone. But if you're living in a country and serving people(working in government sector) where almost majority of the people speak hindi don't you think you should have some sort of understanding to treat the people in their own language? I live in india and i have seen situations where people find it easy to grasp hindi than any other languages. Out of all those 1600+ language majority of them resembles and sounds like hindi ( just few accent differences are there) rajasthani, marwadi, mewadi, Bhojpuri,urdu, Haryanvi all resembles hindi i.e. if you know even a little bit of hindi you can deal with majority of north indian languages.
It's perfectly fine to choose Hindi over English in Hindi speaking states (North India). But why some North Indians demand that South Indians speak in Hindi because it's our "national language"? That's where this Hindi imposition becomes a problem. South has it's own languages, cultures, food. I get the feeling that BJP wants whole of India to follow North Indian version of Hinduism.
Hindi is taught is schools...its you who dint gave it importance its not about what benefits you get from speaking Hindi..its more about what most states prefer to interact in.
Out of 39 states 20 prefer interacting in Hindi..even when they all have different mother tongue. Its just the minority south states prefer speaking in there languages which doesn't matter to other as no migrates there( non existent)
You understand that this is not regionally uniform, yes? The 40% Hindi speakers is not "40% Hindi speakers in any given region"; it is "40% Hindi speakers overall", where most of the Hindi speakers live in the northern states and various cities.
> i have seen situations where people find it easy to grasp hindi than any other languages
As a South Indian, there is no utility for Hindi other than to interact with North Indians (which is more or less non existent) or to watch Bollywood movies. English got me a job, everything I learn is because of English.
I speak Hindi, and I have studied in the south. I think the best argument to lance this boil is this
“Let’s speak Tamil or kannad. These states are doing supremely better than all of the Hindi speaking states. Obviously language has something to do with our success, and it would be wrong of us to keep it to ourselves when it should be used to help the nation.”
This short circuits enough wires, and is polite enough to not engage the depressing flame war that is sweeping such discussion.
It’s not logical, but most of this argument is not logical, the proof of which is too much for the margins of this comment.
Not saying you are wrong but it doesn't make sense to me. Hindi is not the native language of any of the states anywhere in India. They all have multiple native languages. The whole language issue is because of the unfortunate language politics in South India but the same flames could be fanned in any part of India believe me. For example in my state (Rajasthan) I am pretty sure there are at least 4 dialects. What's amazing is that nobody is offended if we keep using a foreign language to do all the mediation but as soon as the majority understood Indian language is mentioned everybody is up in arms. I am forgetting the name but a recently passed away Tamil celebrity had made a famous satire on this situation, where everybody must speak in Persian.
Hindi is taught is schools...its you who dint gave it importance its not about what benefits you get from speaking Hindi..its more about what most states prefer to interact in.
Out of 39 states 20 prefer interacting in Hindi..even when they all have different mother tongue. Its just the minority south states prefer speaking in there languages which doesn't matter to other as no migrates there( non existent)
Cantonese is mostly mostly dominant and safe in Hong Kong. It is the language of Guangdong Province (Canton) however, it's being slowly phased out by government efforts [1][2] and by demographics (it's where all the factories are – it attracts Mandarin speakers from rest of China who go there to work and, recent trend, they're starting to settle there).
