Navigating the landscape of languages in India and its growth over the years

 

 

The first thing one needs to gather about India’s linguistic landscape is that it’s very difficult to speak about an ‘Indian language’ as if there were only a single one. The odds of proper communication between two unknown citizens of India stand at 36% though it depends heavily on their ethnicity and place of birth.

Throughout the timelines, defining the languages utilized in India has been a very challenging job since professionals have to compartmentalize between local languages that share many correlations.

This is not exactly surprising given that-

·         India happens to be the seventh-largest country worldwide

·         1.3+ billion people as citizens

·         There is a vast distance between North India and South India which makes it harder to channel languages and their infusions.

A census carried out in 2011 picturized that India comprises of 19,000+ dialects and languages, of which nearly 1,369 are regarded as dialects and a mere 100+ are identified as languages. The languages utilized by Indian citizens belong to mainly two significant families: Dravidian and Indo-European; others are descendants from the Austro-Asian and Tibetan-Burman linguistic families.

The diversity of languages in the incredible India

The Constitution of India recognizes 22 official languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Nepalese, Maithili, Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Assamese, Dogri, Kannada, Manipur, Bodo, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Santali, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sindhi, Konkani, Marathi and Kashmiri. To add on to the knowledge, it is prevalent among the citizens that Tamil and Sanskrit are the two classical languages.

The states of India were organized based on the indistinguishable language spoken in each region, and while Hindi is the official language of the government in India along with English, each state legislature can acquire any regional language as the official language of their state. This makes the job of English language translation service in India more difficult as they have to incorporate experts from diverse backgrounds who know most of the languages in the surrounding states from where it originates. For example, professional English translation services in Mumbai by a translation agency should incorporate translators who would not only have the skill and knowledge of English and Marathi but also languages from adjoining states such as Hindi and Telugu. This will ensure that their clients from neighboring states can also avail services which will help them to expand their business.

Nativization Post-Independence

The nativization of the English language didn’t recede after independence; in fact, the constitution of India was written in English in the year 1950, three years after India’s independence. After several political administrations post-rule of the Nehru government (that dictated Hindi as the sole official language), the government came to the conclusion that the English language had to be present in essential areas such as health service and education so that the Official Languages Act, which was passed in 1963 laid down that English would be utilized alongside Hindi in terms of official purposes. With the advent of this policy, the citizens of India also faced the three-language formula policy by the government in 1976 which didn’t have a lasting impact on the massive Indian population.

The exploitation of the English in India and its progress

Ask any translation agency providing English language translation service in India about their projects and clients, they would openly disclose that most of their clients are organizations or they are serving upper-class people/citizens. This is because the language doesn’t have a stronghold in the general population of India, except the upper-class people. Certified translation services offered by a Standard English translation agency in India would be well aware that Indian English is much different than British English. Advent to the colonial establishment of the British Empire, English improvised by Indians comprises a lot of loanwords from Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic. These agencies are well versed with the notions and elements from foreign languages like Portuguese, with which English has been in contact both in India and in the total South Asia since the 16^th century.

Besides, in a specific conversation among Indians, they feel more agreeable when they implement loanwords than when they speak with the Standard English vocabulary. Moreover, extended words are preferred when Indians utilize English owing to the fact that they are divulged much more in written English.