India, A Diversified Land with Diverse Languages

Guwahati: We the Indians have hundreds of languages and dialects basing on the geographical differences and on such grounds, it is quite natural for two Indians, in a random meet at a place that does not belong to both, to choose to speak in a language that both can understand. For a person from Nagaland, for instance, to communicate with a person from Himachal Pradesh, the only Indian language they would have in common is Hindi and in that too, it is doubtful whether they would be able to understand each other’s accents.

There are several factors behind the lack of communication and variation in the people of the nation and the first and most prominent is that India being a multilingual country has people speaking a variety of languages. Some among them are bilingual and some are multilingual and this means, such people will be able to converse with another person they meet in another part of the country. However, this percentage of the bilingual or multilingual people too is quite less. There are only 7% such people who know three or more languages.

The dominance of the Hindi belt is in India, is certainly more than any other language as more than 97% of the people in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand can speak Hindi. This is similar in other nine Hindi-dominated north Indian states as well.

Regional diversity is another reason for which there are such huge differences in the language spoken by the people. On such grounds, the chances of a random person from the Hindi belt speaking with someone from outside the region are quite low. In this context, an instance can be cited here where a person from Uttar Pradesh has a 42% probability of being able to talk to someone from Gujarat.

However, apart from the geographical differences, the differences in the culture, ethnicity, community etc too plays a significant role in creating differences in the languages. In fact, the neighboring states Kerala and Karnataka can only be cited here. The probability of two persons from these two states communicating with each other is merely 5%.

Also read: National News