but in India regional languages are not dissuaded.
This was funny too. Are they "not dissuaded" because you get the sh*t kicked out of you when you try to impose Hindi in all these southern and eastern states? Could that be the reason Delhi doesn't "dissuade" the regional dialects?
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Imposing Hindi across India threatens to undermine its linguistic diversity
There have been numerous attempts by the BJP administration to override regional dialects and languages
Samanth Subramanian
September 29, 2019
Standing before a packed stadium in Houston, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked his audience a rhetorical question: how are things in India? Before the 50,000 Indian-Americans who gathered to greet him on his US tour last week, he answered in Hindi: “All is well” – then repeated the answer in Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali and four other languages.
The point he was making was more significant than the message, but just in case it passed people by, Mr Modi later made it explicit. “Our various languages are an important identity of our liberal and democratic society,” he said. “For centuries, our nation has been moving forward with dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects.”
It felt like firefighting: an exertion to battle the heat that Mr Modi’s government has been facing this month after Amit Shah, his home minister, suggested it was “extremely necessary” for Hindi to project India’s identity in the world.
“Today, if any one language can do the job of holding the country together with the thread of unity, it is indeed the most widely spoken, Hindi,” Mr Shah tweeted a fortnight ago.
His remarks have ignited a blaze of controversy and echoes previous clashes over moves to impose Hindi upon a nation with thousands of languages and dialects. And it has raised the fear that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will try to do so again.
With remarkable wisdom, BR Ambedkar and his fellow architects of India’s constitution avoided designating a national language when they drew up the document in 1949. Instead, they named two official languages in which the federal government could conduct its business: English and Hindi. India’s states, they added, could determine their own official languages.
In a country where 43 per cent of people use Hindi as their mother tongue, this was a reasonable compromise.
Yet even as provinces were being formed along linguistic lines, this arrangement nearly unravelled in the mid-1960s. The Indian government moved to discard English altogether as an official language. Among the implications of this was that civil service examinations would be conducted in Hindi.
This set off violent protests. In Tamil Nadu and other parts of south India, where the languages belong to a different linguistic family altogether, riots ensued. The government backed down, not only retaining English but conducting public service examinations in regional languages as well."
FYI, Pakistan loves and sustains its regional languages and cultures. We are just sensible enough to understand the benefits of a national language without killing each other over it. Perhaps it's because we actually wish to be a united country.