Do You Speak Any Indian?

During my last trip here, I was watching some television show called "The Great Indian Wedding" (yes, I was watching it because a) it was in English and b) I was tired of watching the same loop of news on CNN International) when the ignorance of my fellow Americans jumped out at me. The show focuses on some obscenely rich Indian and their wedding festivities. This particular episode featured a wealthy Sikh who lived in Delhi and New York, and was supposedly an actor. He invited all of his 1,000 friends to the 7 day party. One friend was an older American socialite who proclaimed at the end of the ceremony: "It was beautiful, I just wish I spoke Indian so I could have understood what they were saying." Duh!

The second moment occurred back in DC, when I was asked the "Do you speak Indian?" question at a bar. The person asking assumed everyone spoke Indian and wasn't aware that there is no such language. Double duh!!

So the purpose of this lesson is to educate the six of you reading it about the complexities of language here in India.

First off, not everyone speaks Hindi or English. As a matter of fact, only a minority of Indians speak Hindi. 337 million to be specific, out of a population of about 1.1 billion. Did you know more Indians speak English than Hindi? 350 million can speak English (keep in mind bilingual/multilingual skills are far better here than in the US). The way I figure, the largest English speaking country isn't the US - it's India.

There are many "official" languages here. Many of the boundaries of Indian states were actually layed out because of language. The list is long: Hindi (337 million), Telugu (80 million), Tamil (74 million), Bengali (70 million), Marathi (60 million), Urdu (43 million), Gujarati (41 million), Kannada (44 million), Malayalam (30 million), Oriya (28 million), Maithili (25 million), Punjabi (23 million), Bhojpuri (23 million), Assamese (13 million), Gondi (2.1 Million), Sindhi (2.1 Million), Konkani (1.7 Million), Meitei (1.2 Million), Nepali (1 Million), Kashmiri (0.5 million), and Sanskrit (<0.1 million). I didn't even know anyone spoke Sanskirt anymore.

Other significant languages found here include: Angika (0.7 million), Kokborok (1.3 million), Wagdi, Halbi, Marwari (12 million), Chhattisgarhi (11 million), Magahi (11 million), Awadhi (0.5 million), Tulu (2 million), Kodava, Dogri, Persian, French, Portuguese, Bodo, Santhali, Sikkimese, Dzongkha, and Dakkhini aka Deccani (11 million).

Is your head spinning? Mine is.