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> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1

> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect. > A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German. Most of the well-known Indian languages actually fail this test. Someone who has grown up speaking Hindi cannot reliably converse with someone in Bangla, Sambalpuri, or Tamil. If anything, the word "dialect" is overused regarding India – Bhojpuri [2] was often mentioned as a dialect of Hindi; but as a fluent Hindi speaker I cannot claim to understand or have a fluid conversation with someone speaking Bhojpuri. I am glad that it is at least sometimes referred to as a language now. ---------------------------------------------------- [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhojpuri_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhojpuri_language

rusticpenn 6y ago
At least with Hindi and Tamil, you can be sure because they come from different language families.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  True. This may sound obvious to you, but I am not so sure about its obviousness in general in the West. A lot of western-educated people have asked me “So Hindi is the main language, and there are a lot of different dialects throughout the country, right?” – and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that, so I go with the time-tested “Well, it's slightly different...”
  - vram22 6y ago
    > and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that (I have studied Sanskrit and Hindi in school for multiple years, and can understand a good amount of Marathi and Tamil.) You can say this - I think it is true, not quite verified (partly heard from older relatives, partly deduction based on observing similarities in the mentioned languages' vocabularies): Sanskrit came first - thousands of years ago. It is the language of the Vedas, 4 of India's most ancient scriptures. Many northern (including east and west) Indian languages are similar to Sanskrit and likely are descendants of it. Hindi, Gujarati, Marwari, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya (not sure, but it sounds some like Bengali), Marathi, are some of these. Languages of Indian states further east than Bengal, called the North Eastern states, like Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, etc. may not show a lot of Sanskrit influence because they may have Oriental influence instead, such as from SE Asia, China, etc. Except Assamese may have some Sanskrit influence, also not sure of Manipuri. And of the southern states in the peninsula, Tamil has the least Sanskrit influence and is also said to be very ancient. The other three, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, have some Sanskrit influence. Caveat: I am not a language expert.
    - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
      Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit. Assamese (and Oriya) is essentially a somewhat distant dialect of Bengali. Most languages of Asia that aren't part of the Chinese world (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and modern Vietnamese) have tons of Sanskrit or Pali (or both) in them. Tamil has lots of sanskrit in it (good examples are naka meaning finger nail, singa meaning lion, ampala from ambara meaning sky) it just has less than other dravidian languages, presumbaly because of its much older literary tradition. Literaly Malayalam looks literary Tamil, with all the words converted to Sanskrit. It's kind of funny!
      - guruparan18 6y ago
        And Tamil have long tradition of resisting Sanskirt influence. With elaborate grammar rules dictating if you must use loan words when, where and how to use them. It is more true for literary setting and never true for day-today speaking. Also, Tamil words also made into Sanskrit, don't know what it means. Languages are basically for interchanging ideas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
        I mean... Tamilians sort of dominated of dominated Sanskrit literature in 7th-10th centuries. Dandin, Kumarila, Shankara, Dharmakirti, Ramanujan and Madhva. Not to mention the Bhagavatapurana, which very quickly became probably the most important religious text in India! I wouldn't say Tamilians rejected sanskrit... they just kept the two seperate. There aren't very many tamilian words itself in sanskrit (mina meaning fish is the only one I can think of), but there are proto-dravidian loan words in Sanskrit.
        valarauko 6y ago
        Most of the people in that list were likely not Tamilian - Shankara was likely Malayali, Kumarila & Dharmakirti are just as likely to have been from Assam, and Madhva was Tuluva. What about the Bhagavatapurana is Tamil?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    "The situation is a lot more nuanced than that."
  - kevinpet 6y ago
    "it's slightly different" confuses the issue. It seems easy to say, "actually, no, India has multiple unrelated language groups as different from each other as English is from Hindi, and I don't just mean in isolated villages"
  - fromaj 6y ago
    I usually explain it as being similar to the differences in languages across Europe. If you take portuguese at one end and russian at the other and start tracing across countries, you'll notice certain similarities and patterns but also encounter a lot of unique character especially in some areas. Spanish and portuguese people might be able to understand a little of each other like tamil and malayalam speakers and so on.
Arnavion 6y ago
That would make Hindi and Urdu dialects of each other. I'm not saying this is necessarily right or wrong; it's a landmine I don't want to touch :)
- naruvimama 6y ago
  It is true Urdu is just a colonial imposition, it is synthetically derived from Hindi by insisting that the script be Persian. Tarek Fatah makes a point about why Urdu isn't a distinct language from Hindi.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Yiddish is written in both hebrew letters and latin letters, but is one language. Language speakers don't care too much about the script when evolving their language; they use what they have.
    - iguy 6y ago
      I think Hindi/Urdu is quite a bit like Serbian/Croatian. The preferred script followed the religious divide, but (if I understand right) both sort-of standardised quite similar dialects out of a range of possibilities. And then later they were politically divided, and there were some efforts to move the official vocabulary away from each other's. IIRC Sanskrit has also been written in dozens of scripts, there's a perfect one-to-one transliteration into most (maybe all) the north-indian scripts, although they have extra characters for their own sounds.
      - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
        Since all indian scripts besides the Urdu Nastaliq were originally developed to write sanskrit, the transliteration is indeed perfect!
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Why is it a landmine? I am an Urdu speaker, and totally fine with realizing that Urdu is the Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language, and Hindi is the standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language.
emteycz 6y ago
That definition does not work with Czech and Slovak.
- tgv 6y ago
  Why? Aren't they rather close, and more of a language family than two distinct languages?
  - emteycz 6y ago
    They are distinct languages from the same language family, which are understood by speakers of the other language, but not spoken. Czechs understand Slovaks and vice versa, but both are talking in their own languages, and speaking the other language can't be done properly without studying it.
yumraj 6y ago
Bhojpuri, Maithili, Haryanwi, Braj, Bundelkhandi, dialects from Rajasthan, Himachal and so and so forth, and I'll say even Khari boli are all dialects of Hindi. We may not be able to have a fluent conversation, but for most part we'll understand the context and will be able to speak. In fact Hindi dialects change every 100km or so I'll say in the Hindi belt. Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas neighboring the Hindi belt) are not dialects, they are languages, even though from that list Gujrati and Marathi use Devnagri script (or very close to it).
- mistrial9 6y ago
  hmm American here - but I vaguely recall.. Gurmukhi is a variation on Punjabi, used by Sikhs for religious purposes, but Urdu is a 'persianized' version of Hindi (?) Checking wikipedia, it mentions a "Punjabi diaspora family of languages." These distinctions seem understandable and interesting to me, of European descent and non-political. thanks yumraj, for the many posts here today on this, it feels important at some basic level. I enjoyed reading "In Search of the Cradle of Civilization" long ago.. and studied personally with one of the authors, in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Kak#In_Search_of_the_Cradle_of_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Kak#In_Search_of_the_C...
  - yumraj 6y ago
    Gurmukhi is the script used to write Punjabi, at least in India. It was created by a Sikh Guru. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi Interestingly, Pakistan has a state called Punjab where Punjabi is the main language, but I’m not sure what script they use. Regarding Hindi and Urdu, I found the wikipedia page to at least be informative. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controver...
    - valarauko 6y ago
      Pakistani Punjabi uses the Shahmukhi script, which is based on the Perso-Arabic script.

rusticpenn 6y ago

At least with Hindi and Tamil, you can be sure because they come from different language families.

quadrifoliate 6y ago
True. This may sound obvious to you, but I am not so sure about its obviousness in general in the West. A lot of western-educated people have asked me “So Hindi is the main language, and there are a lot of different dialects throughout the country, right?” – and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that, so I go with the time-tested “Well, it's slightly different...”
- vram22 6y ago
  > and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that (I have studied Sanskrit and Hindi in school for multiple years, and can understand a good amount of Marathi and Tamil.) You can say this - I think it is true, not quite verified (partly heard from older relatives, partly deduction based on observing similarities in the mentioned languages' vocabularies): Sanskrit came first - thousands of years ago. It is the language of the Vedas, 4 of India's most ancient scriptures. Many northern (including east and west) Indian languages are similar to Sanskrit and likely are descendants of it. Hindi, Gujarati, Marwari, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya (not sure, but it sounds some like Bengali), Marathi, are some of these. Languages of Indian states further east than Bengal, called the North Eastern states, like Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, etc. may not show a lot of Sanskrit influence because they may have Oriental influence instead, such as from SE Asia, China, etc. Except Assamese may have some Sanskrit influence, also not sure of Manipuri. And of the southern states in the peninsula, Tamil has the least Sanskrit influence and is also said to be very ancient. The other three, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, have some Sanskrit influence. Caveat: I am not a language expert.
  - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
    Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit. Assamese (and Oriya) is essentially a somewhat distant dialect of Bengali. Most languages of Asia that aren't part of the Chinese world (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and modern Vietnamese) have tons of Sanskrit or Pali (or both) in them. Tamil has lots of sanskrit in it (good examples are naka meaning finger nail, singa meaning lion, ampala from ambara meaning sky) it just has less than other dravidian languages, presumbaly because of its much older literary tradition. Literaly Malayalam looks literary Tamil, with all the words converted to Sanskrit. It's kind of funny!
    - guruparan18 6y ago
      And Tamil have long tradition of resisting Sanskirt influence. With elaborate grammar rules dictating if you must use loan words when, where and how to use them. It is more true for literary setting and never true for day-today speaking. Also, Tamil words also made into Sanskrit, don't know what it means. Languages are basically for interchanging ideas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
        I mean... Tamilians sort of dominated of dominated Sanskrit literature in 7th-10th centuries. Dandin, Kumarila, Shankara, Dharmakirti, Ramanujan and Madhva. Not to mention the Bhagavatapurana, which very quickly became probably the most important religious text in India! I wouldn't say Tamilians rejected sanskrit... they just kept the two seperate. There aren't very many tamilian words itself in sanskrit (mina meaning fish is the only one I can think of), but there are proto-dravidian loan words in Sanskrit.
        valarauko 6y ago
        Most of the people in that list were likely not Tamilian - Shankara was likely Malayali, Kumarila & Dharmakirti are just as likely to have been from Assam, and Madhva was Tuluva. What about the Bhagavatapurana is Tamil?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  "The situation is a lot more nuanced than that."
- kevinpet 6y ago
  "it's slightly different" confuses the issue. It seems easy to say, "actually, no, India has multiple unrelated language groups as different from each other as English is from Hindi, and I don't just mean in isolated villages"
- fromaj 6y ago
  I usually explain it as being similar to the differences in languages across Europe. If you take portuguese at one end and russian at the other and start tracing across countries, you'll notice certain similarities and patterns but also encounter a lot of unique character especially in some areas. Spanish and portuguese people might be able to understand a little of each other like tamil and malayalam speakers and so on.

Arnavion 6y ago

That would make Hindi and Urdu dialects of each other. I'm not saying this is necessarily right or wrong; it's a landmine I don't want to touch :)

naruvimama 6y ago
It is true Urdu is just a colonial imposition, it is synthetically derived from Hindi by insisting that the script be Persian. Tarek Fatah makes a point about why Urdu isn't a distinct language from Hindi.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Yiddish is written in both hebrew letters and latin letters, but is one language. Language speakers don't care too much about the script when evolving their language; they use what they have.
  - iguy 6y ago
    I think Hindi/Urdu is quite a bit like Serbian/Croatian. The preferred script followed the religious divide, but (if I understand right) both sort-of standardised quite similar dialects out of a range of possibilities. And then later they were politically divided, and there were some efforts to move the official vocabulary away from each other's. IIRC Sanskrit has also been written in dozens of scripts, there's a perfect one-to-one transliteration into most (maybe all) the north-indian scripts, although they have extra characters for their own sounds.
    - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
      Since all indian scripts besides the Urdu Nastaliq were originally developed to write sanskrit, the transliteration is indeed perfect!
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Why is it a landmine? I am an Urdu speaker, and totally fine with realizing that Urdu is the Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language, and Hindi is the standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language.

emteycz 6y ago

That definition does not work with Czech and Slovak.

tgv 6y ago
Why? Aren't they rather close, and more of a language family than two distinct languages?
- emteycz 6y ago
  They are distinct languages from the same language family, which are understood by speakers of the other language, but not spoken. Czechs understand Slovaks and vice versa, but both are talking in their own languages, and speaking the other language can't be done properly without studying it.

yumraj 6y ago

Bhojpuri, Maithili, Haryanwi, Braj, Bundelkhandi, dialects from Rajasthan, Himachal and so and so forth, and I'll say even Khari boli are all dialects of Hindi. We may not be able to have a fluent conversation, but for most part we'll understand the context and will be able to speak. In fact Hindi dialects change every 100km or so I'll say in the Hindi belt. Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi and others (picking from areas neighboring the Hindi belt) are not dialects, they are languages, even though from that list Gujrati and Marathi use Devnagri script (or very close to it).

mistrial9 6y ago
hmm American here - but I vaguely recall.. Gurmukhi is a variation on Punjabi, used by Sikhs for religious purposes, but Urdu is a 'persianized' version of Hindi (?) Checking wikipedia, it mentions a "Punjabi diaspora family of languages." These distinctions seem understandable and interesting to me, of European descent and non-political. thanks yumraj, for the many posts here today on this, it feels important at some basic level. I enjoyed reading "In Search of the Cradle of Civilization" long ago.. and studied personally with one of the authors, in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Kak#In_Search_of_the_Cradle_of_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhash_Kak#In_Search_of_the_C...
- yumraj 6y ago
  Gurmukhi is the script used to write Punjabi, at least in India. It was created by a Sikh Guru. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi Interestingly, Pakistan has a state called Punjab where Punjabi is the main language, but I’m not sure what script they use. Regarding Hindi and Urdu, I found the wikipedia page to at least be informative. Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi%E2%80%93Urdu_controver...
  - valarauko 6y ago
    Pakistani Punjabi uses the Shahmukhi script, which is based on the Perso-Arabic script.