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Comment by joshuaissac | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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