Will English kill off India's languages?

[FairAndUnbiased]

Perhaps, the biggest obstacle preventing East Asians from English fluency is their symbolic writing system.
But nationwide English fluency also has its all pros and cons, for example: mastering English help you in approaching the latest in science and technology but English speaking people are just to easy to be influenced by Western culture and ideology.
In Vietnam I can see quite a few English speaking Vietnamese will pay visit to temple in the New Year as our tradition had it instead of celebrating Valentine Days, Christmas Day...
It turned out that people who did their best in preserving and practicing our traditions were the ones had least contact with Western culture.

Bad English didn't stop East Asian countries from getting good at science and technology. In China, there's plenty of English illiterates who still celebrate Christmas and Valentines Day as excuses to party. Same in Japan, there are lots of English illiterates who celebrate Western holidays. That doesn't mean much to celebrate holidays. The real problem comes when you start associating English with upper class and native language with lower class, which has indeed happened in many countries. In Australia, they might have made you read <Black Skins, White Masks> by Franz Fanon, right? That book explains this phenomenon perfectly.

 

[T90TankGuy]

can a man ever forget his mother? its the same with our mother tongue .

 

[holysaturn]

Tamil is the oldest surviving language n it will remain so in the coming centuries or even milleniums,,,,,,,,it is continuosly evolving and i njoy speaking tamil than any other language(telugu,english) i kno...........

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

If you guys believe that English is only a communication tool in the West, then probably not.

 

[InFn-0]

The reason why english is so widespread in india is because there is no official language of India. Different regions speak different languages altogether(not dialect) so without english things would become increasingly complicated.

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

The reason why english is so widespread in india is because there is no official language of India. Different regions speak different languages altogether(not dialect) so without english things would become increasingly complicated.

Why not make Hindi as the official language?

 

[GURU DUTT]

Why not make Hindi as the official language?

Hindi is owr official language but english is buisness language kindly use wikipedia if you cant google thanks .

 

[Bhairava]

........ When a country regain independent, it will often try to eliminate all traces left behind in colonial era which is considered as sorta humiliation.

That is true of nations that are insecure and not confident of their own culture matching/out-living the foreign culture. [ An apt analogy would be protectionism in trade. Only those industries that are not confident of survival on competing with foreign products are protected while others that are sure compete in the open market ...We are the second category].

We had no such inferiority complex/insecurity. We know where we stood and what English & our mother tongue meant to us respectively.

And we were right, English is still the second language and each of us is still proud of our own language. English is just a language of convenience. Not of identity.

Our identity has never changed/will never change.

 

[Manas]

Why not make Hindi as the official language?

Hindi is also our official language along with English at the national level.

While at the state level its the regional language which is the official language along with English.

 

[military hawk]

india was colonised, thus they use british language, legal system, education system.

india is under the western sphere of influence just like japan and south korea.
india is a western colony.

there are only 2 truly independent large nations that are not under the western sphere of influence(slaves of the west), they are russia and china.
russia and china are the only nations that dont bow down to the west like slaves.

the west will only allow their lapdog nations to prosper up to a point, but they are not allowed to change the current western led world order. if any nation that challenges the western order, they are pushed back hard using their slaves to do the donkey work.

the western mindset is, either ur with us or against us.

only russia and china have the independence to challenge the current western-led world order.

that is why india will NEVER be a superpower. they will never be allowed to be at the superpower level by the west. the west will see to it that they dont.
when the west says 'jump', india has absolutely no choice but to say 'how high sir'.

 

[jamal18]

Exactly right a truely great nation only had their own official languages

words of wisdom

 

[kingkobra]

english has no respect in india..it just has importance in terms of business...we respect our mother tongues more than any other language and this is the reason we have regional parties...

---------- Post added at 03:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:33 PM ----------

Why not make Hindi as the official language?

we have many languages..we are not as cruel as chinese to force one language on all people...each of our language has huge history and it will survive for eons to come..

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

About China, I've noticed that even though Mandarin has gained a lot of prominence in China (& is spoken by pretty much every Chinese person today), when you go to Southern parts of China, you will find a lot of other dialects pretty much incomprehensible with Mandarin; like Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Tibetan & others. I believe Mandarin has its dominating presence in North China.

That's right, South China especially has a lot of different dialects. Here in Hong Kong we speak mainly Cantonese.

Mandarin (Standard Chinese) is the "lingua franca" that allows everyone in China to communicate with each other, regardless of regional dialect.

 

[kingkobra]

That's right, South China especially has a lot of different dialects. Here in Hong Kong we speak mainly Cantonese.

Mandarin (Standard Chinese) is the "lingua franca" that allows everyone in China to communicate with each other, regardless of regional dialect.

Chinese regions fight back against surge of Mandarin | Reuters

you won't see this in india...in mumbai itself muncipal corporation runs schools in 9 different languages..English, Hindi, Marathi, Kanada, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu and Gujarati and english.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

you won't see this in india...in mumbai itself muncipal corporation runs schools in 9 different languages..English, Hindi, Marathi, Kanada, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu and Gujarati and english.

What do you think of America/Britain/Canada/Australia/Japan/Germany etc. who have all standardized one language as the medium of education and government?

Do you think they are "cruel" as well?

I am a native Cantonese speaker, but I can clearly see that a nation should be able to communicate with itself across all regions. India does this too, but with English.