My footprints in India (09)

My footprints in India (9)

We move on to the interesting topic of Indian languages. There are 22 national languages recognised by the Constitution of India (“scheduled languages”), of which Hindi is the official language of the Republic. Different states use different languages as their own official languages. English is used as the medium of communication between the Hindi-speaking north and the non-Hindi-speaking south, and is widely used in the professions and the intelligentsia.

You may wonder why are there 22 national languages in India. But let’s consider China. How many Chinese dialects are there? Uncountable. But the linguists group them into seven major groups. Besides (1) Northern dialects (prime representative being Mandarin), we have (2) Cantonese, (3) Wu dialects (Shanghainese being its prime example), (4) Hunan (Xiang) dialects, (5) Jiangxi (Gan) dialects, (6) Min dialects (Fujianese) (Hokkan, i.e. South Fujianese or Taiwanese, being its prime example) and (7) Hakka etc. Although these dialects are mutually unintelligible, we consider them as variants of a single language. The single major factor is that we share the same script in Chinese and today most of us write Chinese according to Mandarin (except some of us in Hong Kong and Taiwan who write in our own dialects). Chinese characters are ideographs, which (can) bear meaning independent of its pronunciation. So my friends from Hangzhou cannot understand me if I speak in Cantonese, but they can certainly understand what I write.

Written on 27^th July 2005.

(For a list of Indian languages, you can visit

http://indiaimage.nic.in/languages.htm (Government of India website)

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/li/list_of_national_languages_of_india.htm (This website provides brief explanation of the status of Hindi and English in India today and a list of official languages of different states.)

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雪泥鴻爪在天竺（九）

好了，那我們就講講印度的語言這有趣的話題。印度憲法賦予二十二種語言法定地位，其中印地語是共和國的官方語言。不同的邦用不同的官方語言。英語是說印地語的北方和不說印地語的南方交流的媒介，專業人士和知識份子中亦常用英語。

你可能會問印度為什麼會有二十二種國家語言呢？但試想想中國。漢語裡有多少種方言？多不勝數。但語言學家把他們分成七大組，除了以普通話為代表的北方方言外，我們有粵語、吳語（以上海話為代表）、湘語（湖南話）、贛（Gan）語（江西話）、閩語（代表有閩南話，也就是台語）和客家話等。雖然這些方言彼此之間是無法交流的，但我們還是把它們視為同一語言的變種。最大的原因是我們共用同一的文字，再而今天我們寫現代漢語是以普通話為基準的（除了我們中間有少數的香港人和台灣人以自己的方言來寫作。）漢字是表意文字，形與音可以是獨立分開的。所以杭州的朋友雖聽不懂我說的廣東話，但他們看得明白我寫什麼。

在2005年8月7日翻譯成中文

〔印度法定語言一覽:

http://indiaimage.nic.in/languages.htm (印度政府網頁)

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/li/list_of_national_languages_of_india.htm (此網頁簡介印地語和英語在今天的印度的地位，並列有各邦之官方語言)〕

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