Having studied in convent boarding schools, it was the norm for my classmates to not be able to speak any language except English. I was too young to care about

Having studied in convent boarding schools, it was the norm for my classmates to not be able to speak any language except English. I was too young to care about census data back then, so I did not ask my classmates. But extrapolating much later on, I have the impression that there are millions of monolingual English speakers here. I don't trust the linguistic census of India. The instructions for census agents are complex [1], and I don't trust that the people who are forced to go door-to-door would have the energy to explain this at each house. > It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point was: who decides, and on what basis? There was a time when Australians did not consider their accent acceptable on their own news channels. They adopted RP [2]. Would you consider John Bishop's scouse accent [3] unnatural? How about all the other accents of UK, like Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.? > Why no Indian? No idea. The vagaries of business decisions and culture. Most Indian programs are terrible, IMO. Many of my female cousins watch Korean soap operas. Among my younger cousins, anime is the norm. All with subtitles. > when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. To the contrary, it would depend on the locality of the cafe, the topic of the conversation, their interpersonal dynamics, and so on. My school required us to speak just English on the premises, and would scold us if we used Kannada. Fining kids [4] is pretty common too. It eventually leads to school kids using English with each other after school too. In a city like Raichur or Kolar, the odds of Kannada being the default language are good. In Bangalore, while I think I can predict the language, my prediction would depend on a lot of local factors. [1] https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/gen_note.html https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIshUJUvdbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIshUJUvdbo [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223807