English/Hindi


This was a great movie, just one question...does anyone know why they combine English and Hindi when they speak?

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They combine english and hindi, bcos thats how people speak in India. Indian languages have a large usage of english words, mostly the sentence construction is in the Indian language with the use of English words

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Great Britain had a strong presence in India since the 1500s and India was actually part of the British Empire until independence in 1947, so that might have something to do with English being included with Hindi. FYI, they do this a lot in the Philippines, too...combine Tagalog (Filipino) and English together, forming Taglish.

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That's sort of true here in the USA where in many areas near the US-Mexican border they combine English with some Spanish words and sentenaces, or a crue informal word, Spanglish.

One 'Bollywood' movie I've seen (I forgot the title) has one scene in a classroom where a teacher is teaching the history of India to a class of students, boys and girls at ages between seven and eight. The writings on the blackboard are in Hindi or Gujarati, but the textbook the students have on their desks are in English. The teacher speaks in Hindi (with English subtitles) to the class about the British presents in India during the 19th century, when some of the boys and girls begin talking (in Hindi) about the atrocities of the British and imposement of British laws and of the summary killings of they people by the British troops during the 1857-58 Mutinty in India where one boy begins detailing the graphic nature of the killings. The teacher stops the class by speaking, in English: "that's enough! Silence will be tolorated!" The whole class becomes silent, actually understanding her, despite being seven to eight-year-old kids.

Speaking from experence, this is true in all of India where whatever mother tougne they speak (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Gujarati, Urdu or Hindustani), most of them mix English with whatever language they speak from wherever in India.

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It gets even better. While Hindi is the official national language and English is the unofficial one, each state might have multiple languages, especially in the south. For example in Hyderabad, the Muslim population speaks Urdu, the Hindu population speaks Telegu, and they all speak "Hyderabadi Hindi" with each other - this is a mixture of Hindi, Urdu, Telegu, and English!

BTW that's an impressive list of Indian languages you gave! You forgot mine - Konkoni - spoken in Goa and along the Konkon coast.

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I know because I've traveled to India and seen most of the country many times. I can only speak some Hindi, some Urdu, and a few Tamil words, but I'm not fluent in any. I can bearly write or read the Indian languages in the Hindi or Dravidian scrips. Most of the population (72%) is Indo-Aryan which speak a sort-of Indo-Iranian language which Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjaib, Urdu are all inter-related to each other and share the same written script.

But in the southern part of India, 25% of the population is the darker-skinned Dravidian minority, the orginal inhabidents of India, whose languages (Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, etc.) are written in a different Dravidian script and are totally unrelated to the Indo-Ayrian languages of northern Indian and I found them a little harder to learn and speak. Plus, many of the movies filmed and produced in southern Indian bearly hold a candle to the bigger budgeted "Bollywood" studio films from Mumbai. Most of the Tamil or Telugu language films produded in Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Thiruchchirappalli, in those southern Indian states are either low-budget potboiler soap operas or grade-B action flicks with no musical production numbers, and lots of violence. No offense indended. I am not of Indian enthicitiy, but just a caucasian admirer of those Bollywood films.

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In lonely planet, it says that you will find up to 18 different langauges in India. More than any other country that I 've ever read about.

A lot of the Indians label their language as "Hinglish."

Director Deepa Mehta said that she was raised in India speaking English and that Hindi was her second language.

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