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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

India has been independent of colonial rule for over 5-7 decades depending on the area and influence of English and even Portuguese (in Goa) still persist.

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I think trying to "reverse" something like this is not only untenable but actually destructive. The history of every language and culture is one of brutality and conquest as well as mutual exchange. That doesn't mean that we should be trying to revert to some imagined "pure" time before the traumatic event.

I'm a product of brutal attempts at nation building by the American war machine. I wouldn't be speaking English otherwise. But that doesn't mean that this language isn't mine. If I were forced to speak and write differently because of some political initiative, it wouldn't be a return to authenticity. It would be forcing me to reject a part of me that's already been irreversibly changed.

There have been successful (depending on your point of view) attempts of ridding languages of foreign influences.

For example, Icelandic, which in the 19th century had speakers who worked on replacing Danish loanwords with Icelandic neologisms, and today a good amount of effort is put into coining Icelandic words rather than loaning English ones.

Norwegian had something similar albeit with less success. There are two official written standards for Norwegian, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål retains more Danish influence, and reflects Norwegian dialects with more Danish influence (especially urban centres like Oslo), while Nynorsk is more 'pure' Norwegian, favouring more traditional grammar. Notably, the three gender system features more prominently in Nynorsk, where it is mandatory, as opposed to Bokmål, where the feminine can optionally be given masculine determiners, which is similar to how Swedish and Danish have collapsed the masculine/feminine genders into a single common gender. The movement for Nynorsk was also in the 19th century, powered by Norwegian nationalism, but only about 10-15% of Norwegians use it.

Notably, though, in both cases the efforts to revert foreign influences on the language came from a grassroots, bottom-up approach, rather than a change from the top. And for the more successful case of Icelandic, well, linguistic reform is probably easier if only 300,000 people (probably much less a hundred years ago) speak it.

I think there's a middle ground - as a Korean speaker, it's pretty easy to find linguistic purists lecturing everyone, and also cringey writers making sentences entirely out of English words barely strung together by Korean suffixes.

In the end, I believe we should consider each word separately. If a loanword is used by select few, they only hinder communication. (In the worst case, imagine a legal document that's inscrutable to most people.) On the other hand, if a loanword is already understood by everyone, there's no point in removing it: trying to removing it will in fact make communication harder.

The English language without nongermanic influences (a great essay in its own right):

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/studen...

I love that essay, and also this little tidbit from Wikipedia:

> The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (modern English umbe (now obsolete), cognate to German um and Latin ambi-) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

Yes, likewise with almost all colonial areas. Asking the Japanese to stop eating curry, or the Hong Kongers to stop drinking milk tea, or the people of Qingdao to stop making beer, or asking all of China to stop eating egg tarts, would only wreak havoc on culture.

After a generation or two such things become assimilated and a part of local culture. The people alive today were born with these things, and they consider them their own.

For what it's worth, the use of Portuguese in Goa is hardly because the language has any real relevance still. It's like with Pondicherry. The official publication of the Union Territory's government is "La Gazette de L'État de Poudouchéry" and the rest of the title page is also in French. (But the actual publications are all in Tamil or English.)

The retained use of French there is symbolic and historical. And the locals have chosen to keep up the tradition. I'm not Indian so it's not my place to say whether such legacies of a colonial history should be discarded. But it strikes me as more quaint than anything else. Such sentimental historical quirks are surely different from when a policy of forced linguistic change is actively in place, as happened under empire (either in India or in Mongolia).

As for English, well, colonization certainly moved things along there, to put it mildly. I certainly understand why some Indians are upset at its heavy use in government and business. Business conducted in a global market set up in large part by the same former colonial power. Learn their tongue if you want any chance of getting ahead. Not a wonderful feeling.

Still, I suspect that even if Britain had never colonized India, assuming they still became a major power and the USA later rose to prominence, it'd probably still be the most widely studied foreign language in India, with encroaching use even in government and business, as it is nearly everywhere.

For what it's worth, one of my French teachers was an Indian francophone and explained that in their region (whose name I cannot remember) French is the dominant language and she grew up speaking French at home.

It was certainly true for an older generation. The European settlers spoke French, and some in and around the French-controlled regions adopted French as a daily language, particularly those dealing with to the colonial government. This was true until the return of the territory in the 1950s. A few families have probably carried on speaking their home language. But in absolute terms, it's quite rare. There were probably fewer than ~100,000 native French speakers in India at the peak, and I believe the majority chose to move to France when the territories were returned to India.

The French didn't venture too far inland. They built outposts for trade, without any desire to rule beyond the walls of these outposts. Perhaps that's why the colonial legacy they left there is seen more as an inoffensive quirk.

I've been measuring the extent of romanization of local languages in india and in the web age it is only accelerating. The vast majority of Hindi, Telugu, Tamil content is written in the English alphabet online - https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.wnut-1.24.pdf

Romanized Hindi / En / tamil are likely the dominant form of expression online - only going to keep growing at this point.

There have been attempts to phase out English and promote Hindi, but this has been met with opposition from non-Hindi southern states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil...

I'm not even Indian and it's shocking that anyone thinks unification around Hindi will happen. Good luck getting Dravidians onboard with cultural imperialism from the north. To my mind the legacy of English colonialism allows north and south India to remain unified because there's a "fair", common third option provided in cultural conflicts between the north and south. That is exactly what the English language is as a national choice.

That was pretty much my impression on the issue, from conversations with several people who lived there. It's a huge country, and all of the regions have their own language, and it's rare for one of the regional languages to be understood more than 1 or 2 regions away. Picking any one region's language to be the Official National Language would piss off everyone in the other regions whose languages weren't chosen. English is understood moderately well everywhere and allows a universal national language without seeming to unduly favor any particular region.

This shows a very useful function for English as a lingua franca. When it’s almost nobody’s first language (it isn’t mine), it removes the political element of who’s first language gets used

It would be funny if the EU could now also agree on it, given that UK is no longer part of it.

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