There's so many different languages spoken in China, many of which are dying or endangered. Moreover, China is by no means a mono culture. The government of China actively promotes a singular language and culture at the cost of those on the margins.

"chinese" isn't one language. It's a set of many languages which share some grammar and a common logographic script (though the script isn't used in exactly the same way for each, e.g. Beijing will write/say 哪儿 instead of 哪里 for "where?" -- there are many other differences but I don't know enough to give a clear idea of its scale).

The spoken languages are quite different otherwise, at least as different as European romance languages. There is a "Standard Mandarin (普通话)" however; which the government has pushed and is spoken by most residents of Mainland China.

I'm skeptical that this is a good way preserving the culture. If language does have an effect of preserving the culture; this move would also have effect of killing subcultures from regions (which may indeed have happened in China; though I don't know). China and India are both pretty diverse culturally.

You're making the argument that the popularity of English is detrimental to the preservation of Indian Culture and in the same breath suggesting forcing Hindi on everyone as a solution, as if it wouldn't have exactly the same effect on a culturally diverse country.

I don't think that's true for any chinese languages other than mandarin and cantonese. I've been in Taiwan for the past few weeks and dipped my toes into Hokkien/Taiwanese/Souther Min, and the situation there is fascinating. In every day normal situations it's never written, if two native hokkien speakers want to send an email or text it will be done in mandarin. In the rare occasion Hokkien is written, it will be done haphazardly. Sometimes you'll choose a mandarin character that kind of means the same thing as a hokkien morpheme, and sometimes they'll choose the mandarin character that kind of sounds the same the same as a hokkien morpheme. Native speakers will be able to read this, but often struggle.

I have read that people used to be able to write Hokkien in characters, but that's lost now. I'm confidently told by native speakers today that the language has no written component (沒有文字). There's romanisation system that seems to be able to represent every sound prefectly, and more has actually been written in romanised hokkien than by any other methods, but Taiwanese people have a bit of a phobia of the latin alphabet, and no one uses it.

But I'm actually unclear about this.

The weird thing is that certain dictionaries give pronunciations of hanzi in multiple Chinese languages (e.g. Wiktionary) including "scriptless" languages.

I've also seen cases in Taiwan where e.g. a restaurant name or place name is written in hanzi and English and the romanization is clearly not using the standard Mandarin pronunciation of the term. An example of this is 淡水 which is romanized "tamsui" in Taiwan but would be "danshui" in pinyin or "tanshui" in Wade-Giles. Syllables ending with "m" are not a thing in Mandarin as far as I know, and 水 is never romanized as "sui" (though I could chalk the 水 one up to an alternate local romanization system like POJ, which I don't know anything about).

Finally, I've also seen text in Taiwan with four-bopomofo ruby. From my understanding of bopomofo; for Mandarin you won't have more than three glyphs plus a tone mark -- the initial consonant, optional medial i/u, and optional final. This also gives me the impression that Min Nan can be written in hanzi. Unless Taiwanese Mandarin differs from Mandarin significantly in pronunciation (which may be the case, I don't know).

All this leads me to believe that other Chinese languages can use hanzi, but do so less often, perhaps? This is something I've always been confused about but never really looked into it.

I have a Taiwanese book for school children that includes the governments romanisation, hanzi, and some kind of extended bopomofo. While the native speaker I was learning with could read hokkien-with-characters, he couldn't do it quickly, and often had to puzzle over a certain character. In cases where they had both characters and romanisation I was able to help him on the characters he was stuck on by (badly) pronouncing the romanisation. Still, I haven't met any Taiwanese hokkien speakers at all interested in romanisation. Which is a shame - it covers all the sounds, and the language does seem to be slowly dying (the fact people don't write it probably has a lot to do with it).

Though it seems like hokkien-with-characters is a thing (from what you say, and also from what I've seen with 4-bopomofo ruby and Wiktionary), just less prevalent. Or perhaps one can look at hanzi at the same level as romanization for Hokkien (except romanization is more prevalent), i.e. "someone else's script that kinda works for us so we use it sometimes"

I'm surprised the extended bopomofo (I assume it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Phonetic_Symbols which actually till now was the thing I thought was bopomofo) is used more as a writing system for Taiwanese.

And that's the thing, they use characters when they have to write it, but even then native speakers struggle to read it because there's no commonly used standard way to do it. In practice, they just write in mandarin.

I call them dialects for lack of a better word. For example, an Algerian Arabic speaker would not be understood by an Egyptian, and a Kuwaiti Arabic speaker would not be understood by a Syrian, etc. Regional dialects may have an accent, but more importantly use different words and may even have different, informal grammatical rules.

When it comes to writing, everyone uses Arabic letters, but each region may write different words depending on the regional dialect.

The entry on Tunisian Arabic[1], which is my native dialect, may provide an idea on how it differs from other dialects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Arabic

Read the first two paragraphs for a better idea of what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

But yeah, it's similar to the Arabic situation, but the scale may be different.

( I apologize in advance if it looks like I am arguing by asking questions. But I am asking because of curiosity/lack of knowledge )

Decades of military rule is not good for your economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_military_government

Not that India hasn't had more than its fair share of both over the centuries.

More and more I think many places would benefit from embracing two languages—the utilitarian/economic one and the cultural/human one. Regional diversity is a good thing, and certainly doesn't deserve to be sacrificed in the name of economic convenience, at least not as long as we hold human life to be superior to material assets.

From personal experience, I'd rather recommend to dabble in as many languages as possible: Each new language so far introduced new concepts (of seeing the world, if you will) and forced me to break through the invisible barriers erected by the language I was raised with.

And, finally, if we need a "world language", can we please agree on French? I think it is so much more pleasant to the ear than English... and it saves those who already speak it from having to read "rsvp, please" ever again ;)

I just glanced as 5 online papers, and one scanned tabloid-style paper.

I still have no idea what you are talking about. What am I supposed to be detecting in the writing here?

edit: I guess I found one or two slight different ways of expressing things, like starting a sentence with "Said he:", but, really it's fairly minor.

(generally there always has been a push for the Hindi language from the central government as well)

I don't ... dispute that? You're continuing with the non sequiturs and it's really hard to tell what point you're trying to make.

("most" is also "bit more than half the population", which isn't that compelling)

> Folks resist and protest because it's not their native language and somehow worse than having English everywhere.

You have not understood the resistance. People don't think it's "somehow worse than having English everywhere". There is no analogous push for English everywhere that people are not opposing.

Sneaky tactics of the last few years include

* In 2014, Modi decided that all social media accounts run by the government would communicate in Hindi, not English. [2]

* In November 2016, new notes were issued that had numbers in Devanagari for the first time in 69 years since Independence, rather than Arabic numerals. [3]

* In March 2017 mile markers in Tamil Nadu were in English and Tamil. Tamil was replaced by Hindi [3]

But this is not limited to this particular government. Previous governments have taken similar steps. Personal anecdote - I studied in an institution funded by Union government where all signposts were written in English and Tamil. This was replaced across the campus at great cost with signposts written in Hindi, English and Tamil. There was not a single person on that campus who didn't know English or Tamil or both, but the Union govt wanted to send a message anyway. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

The sad part is that its not just about hurt feelings, as some Hindi speakers might characterise all of this. We are going down the exact same path as Pakistan did post Independence. They tried to force Urdu down the throats of the millions of Bengali speakers living in (then) East Pakistan. "Incentives" to learn Urdu effectively ended up discriminating against the Bengalis, leaving them disenfranchised. Eventually they couldn't take it any longer and declared Independence. I wish we could learn from history rather than repeating the same old mistakes.

[1] - http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17351.html (It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India)

[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/india-pm-modi-dem...

[3] - http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/web-edits/by-pushin...

Just a minor correction, they are Indian numerals not Arabic.

Out of 39 states 20 prefer interacting in Hindi..even when they all have different mother tongue. Its just the minority south states prefer speaking in there languages which doesn't matter to other as no migrates there( non existent)

You understand that this is not regionally uniform, yes? The 40% Hindi speakers is not "40% Hindi speakers in any given region"; it is "40% Hindi speakers overall", where most of the Hindi speakers live in the northern states and various cities.

> i have seen situations where people find it easy to grasp hindi than any other languages

Again, this is highly regionally biased.

“Let’s speak Tamil or kannad. These states are doing supremely better than all of the Hindi speaking states. Obviously language has something to do with our success, and it would be wrong of us to keep it to ourselves when it should be used to help the nation.”

This short circuits enough wires, and is polite enough to not engage the depressing flame war that is sweeping such discussion.

It’s not logical, but most of this argument is not logical, the proof of which is too much for the margins of this comment.

Out of 39 states 20 prefer interacting in Hindi..even when they all have different mother tongue. Its just the minority south states prefer speaking in there languages which doesn't matter to other as no migrates there( non existent)

Cantonese is mostly mostly dominant and safe in Hong Kong. It is the language of Guangdong Province (Canton) however, it's being slowly phased out by government efforts [1][2] and by demographics (it's where all the factories are – it attracts Mandarin speakers from rest of China who go there to work and, recent trend, they're starting to settle there).

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest-...

[2] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/07/26/clash-over-ma...