Linguistic Situation in the Subcontinent

South Asia is a place like no other in the world, in many ways-

• a 5000-year old civilisation
  
• geographical variance from the highest mountains in the world to one of the most fertile plains in the world
  
• a multitude of cultures and religions co-existing - sometimes peacefully, sometimes not-so-peacefully
  
• unbridled population growth
  
• 40% of the population living on a budget of under $1 a day
  
• home to one of the world's fastest growing economies (pretty contradictory to the above statement, huh?!)

... and also, home to thousands of languages - conservative estimates range to about 2000, including dialects.

Probably the only place which can draw parallels with South Asia is Europe.

BUT...

European languages today primarily employ the Roman script, with some modifications. Some employ the Cyrillic script, and the Greek language has its own script. View these scripts here.

So Europe uses three different scripts for its languages.

South Asia employs no less than fourteen...

• Devanagari
  
• Perso-Arabic
  
• Bangla (Bengali)
  
• Gurmukhi
  
• Tamil
  
• Telugu
  
• Kannada
  
• Malayalam
  
• Gujarati
  
• Sinhala
  
• Oriya
  
• Divehi
  
• Tibetan
  
• ...and of course, Roman

And while Europe has coveniently chosen English in Roman script to be its official language, South Asia is faced with a much bigger problem.

While in India and Pakistan, Hindi-Urdu is the 'national' language, the other 5 countries have different national languages. (Hindi and Urdu are different names given to the same language. Hindi is heavily Sanskritised, while Urdu is heavily Persianised/Arabicised. They both come from the same mother language - Hindustani)

Here are the national languages of the 7 countries of South Asia, with their respective scripts -

• Bhutan - Dzongkha, in Tibetan script
  
• Bangladesh - Bengali, in Bengali script
  
• India - Hindi, in Devanagari script
  
• Maldives - Divehi, in Thaana script
  
• Nepal - Nepali, in Devanagari script
  
• Pakistan - Urdu, in Perso-Arabic script
  
• Sri Lanka - Sinhala, in Sinhala script

Of course, English serves as a common language and also as a tool for international business and communication in all these countries.

In India, there have been people who have advocated English as the national language. But others say that it would be an insult, since we fought for 200 years for Independence from Britain, and more so, because Hindi is understood by 70% of the population.

The same argument is used in Pakistan.

The other countries are much smaller in size, and hence have only one language (or one main language) spoken there. So the choice of official language isn't tough for them.

But English is still widely used in these countries too. Mainly because like I mentioned, it helps in the international arena, and also because, at many times, the native languages fall short in either vocabulary or script-related complications.

Instead of fighting over which language is to take precedence over which, a better option would be to equip all the languages with some basic requirements, which ensure that they can hold their own in any field, in today's world -

• A full-fledged vocabulary, ranging from technical to the abstract
  
• Adequate support for the scripts required in the electronic world (DTP, computers, mobile phones etc.)

Let's tackle the issue of script.

Most of the South Asian scripts are multi-tier, in the sense that symbols may appear on top of one another, unlike in the Roman script, where each letter follows the previous one neatly in a line.

This is very convenient in the electronic world, because a linear script is much easier to process.

South Asian scripts hence require additional treatment -

• suitable rendering and display on computers
  
• a suitable input method, consistent with the structure of the script

Also, all South Asian scripts are not 'inter-transliteratable', i.e., every letter in a particular script, may not have an equivalent in another script.

I will try and deal with these two problems -

• Developing suitable input methods for South Asian scripts
  
• Developing equivalents for every letter in every script, so that ANY South Asian langauge can be written in ANY South Asian script.

Till next time...