3 ms·
In India, the north primarily speaks Hindi, with dialects of Hindi being spoken by state (Punjabi, Bhojpuri etc). South India's language (and where ISRO is prim
by kartD 10y ago
In India, the north primarily speaks Hindi, with dialects of Hindi being spoken by state (Punjabi, Bhojpuri etc). South India's language (and where ISRO is primarily situated) speaks a variety of languages including Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam etc. So English becomes the neutral language when communication is required between the two halves.
On the a16z note, do you mean the Marc Andreessen's colonial comments? I don't remember any squabble with a16z and Indians as a whole.
- sremani 10y agoCorrection: Punjabi is a full-fledged language whether written in Gurumukhi or Shahmukhi. Uniquely one language with two scripts. Punjabi is not a dialect of Hindi.
- kartD 10y agoOops, you're right.
- dmurray 10y agoNot uniquely: Serbo-Croatian is written in Latin or Cyrillic depending what country you are in. Turkish is now officially written in Latin, but used to be written in Arabic. And most prominently, though in a different way, Chinese and Japanese have multiple writing systems.
- wsxcde 10y agoThere many languages with multiple scripts. Konkani is written in both Kannada and Devanagari. Manipuri is written in both Manipuri and Bengali. For a more controversial example, I'd say maybe Urdu/Hindi are basically the same language written in Devanagari or Urdu. (btw, I just looked at Shahmukhi on wikipedia and it is exactly the same as Urdu).