Thread by @sajithpai

A tweet thread on the recent Hindi controversy.

And why an obscure Belgian philosopher's writings explain the rise and rise of Hindi.

1/13

This thread isn’t about language imperialism. Enough has been said, eloquently, on that by many many folks. Rather I wanted to share what I found about the dramatic rise of Hindi as lingua franca today, even amongst South Indians! 2/13

Thanks to 1) presence of hindi in our school curriculum 2) bollywood 3) increasing migration 4) needs of commerce and lastly the laws of ‘ecolinguistics’ / language ecology, more and more of us South / Eastern Indians are speaking Hindi. 3/13

Data on the growth of Hindi as a second language isn’t easy to come by so I pieced together two different pieces of reportage. In 2001, Hindi competed neck and neck with English but by 2011 it had pulled away decisively. That gap has almost definitely widened since then. 4/13

Source of the earlier chart:
2001 data - tezu.ernet.in/wmcfel/pdf/fie…
2011 data from this article - hindustantimes.com/india-news/how…

5/13

Why is Hindi growing so fast? An answer comes from @pvpbrussels (Philippe Van Parijs) who introduced the maximin principle of language use (or really the principle of least exclusion) to determine who speaks what language, when 2 people with varying language strengths interact.

He says

Thus, when a native Telugu speaker with decent English but patchy Hindi, interacts with a migrant labourer from Chattisgarh who speaks fluent Gond and passable Hindi (but no English), then the language of communication will be Hindi. 8/13

This also explains why it is not uncommon to see Hindi as a link language today between two South Indians. I have witnessed this myself when my mother, a native Malayali speaker, conversed with her Telugu-speaking neighbour in Hindi. This was in Kochi. 9/13

The maximin principle explains why more & more South / Eastern Indians are speaking Hindi. Bollywood & the 3-language school curriculum has ensured a minimal awareness of Hindi in most non-Hindi speakers. The reverse isn’t true. 10/13

The Southern / Bengali movie industries aren’t as popular, and there is no requirement to study Telugu / Bengali in the UP / MP state board. This means North Indians have proficiency in at best 2 languages – English & Hindi. If they are less well off, then usually only Hindi.

Thus as South Indians meet people from Central India, the principle of least exclusion forces greater usage of Hindi. The same explains why South Indians who don’t speak each other’s languages or know English, use Hindi to speak to each other, such as my mother & her neighbour.

Anecdata and data will all reveal much the same. Amit Shah needn’t have been quite so heavy handed in his approach. Whether we like it or not, Hindi has increasingly become India’s lingua franca, horror of horrors, even amongst South Indians.

End.