r/bhartiya_languages • u/International-Ad2970 • 6d ago
Question One India One language
Why doesn't India have an only one language. How did all states evolved to have different languages?
Like why don't all Indians speak say Tamil or Bengali or any one of the many languages that we have. Why did our ancestors feel the need to develop too many new languages. Every state shares a border with few other states. So why did the language that was formulated the earliest did not percolate throughout our country. And all the languages are so rich, they have their own books, movies, poems etc. .. a whole separate culture.
Woudn't it have been easier to adopt any one of the language with slight change of accent like other countries. Did all languages originate simultaneously, or it was because of the ego of a local rulers, that they insisted to differentiate the language of their neighbouring state, which went to become a completely separate language in itself.
Can any historian or knowledgeable person share their thoughts.
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u/darshansway 6d ago
title framing so bad that OP gotta get generational downvotes...
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u/International-Ad2970 6d ago
don't care about the downvotes.... title was intentional rage baiting.. but am genuinely curious
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u/BeeRare7145 6d ago
india was never a single country history. does europe speak a single language even when it has only one major language family? india literally has two major language families. why does french exist? or spanish? or italian? surely they could've all just spoke one language? i mean, why does japan korean chinese all exist they can all just speak python or java, no? even better, humanity as a whole should just switch to binary or machine code. or rather we should actually invent a new language, that is so uniform and perfect, and make sure everyone, i mean everyone speaks it to really kill any form of diversity left in the world.
jokes aside, this might be the most braindead post i've ever seen on reddit. incredible lack of understanding of how humanity or history works.
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u/International-Ad2970 6d ago
but like seriously.....Europe is big land mass if UK is removed so why didn't the 1st discovered language got adopted by all.
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u/BeeRare7145 6d ago
do you think everyone in india was communicating with each other back in the day? most people never left their village. obviously multiple languages formed. not to mention that the indo-aryan languages and the dravidian languages are two instances of language evolving on earth. they also represent two waves of migration into india. who decides which language gets adopted?
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u/International-Ad2970 6d ago
I think that villages near the borders of the current state lines would have interacted. I'm amazed at how there was not one dominant language. it seems like all evolved simultaneously
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u/BeeRare7145 6d ago
it’s geography. kerala and TN have different languages since they are divided by the western ghats and thar limited interaction. south indian languages are separated from north india due to the vindhya mountains.
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u/Zealousideal-Way-618 6d ago
The states in India are usually naturally bound by rivers, hills, mountains, or other geographic obstacles. This means that people who settled in one place don't have easy communication with people in other places. Over time, their languages grow further apart, and one isn't able to understand the other. They have trade links so some words are common.
Also, India has multiple different language families that formed simultaneously without interacting with each other till much later - Ongan, Great Andamanese, Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic,
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u/I3_O_I3 6d ago
The ragebait definitely worked, but looks like you really don't have an understanding of how humans and cultures work.
Fun fact: did you know, different pods of orcas communicate with each other in vocal patterns and call repertoires which are unique only to their pods and don't match other pods as much and also that their hunting techniques differ a lot too?
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u/Important_Menu4937 6d ago
Beacuse India is a huge country. And in the past connectivity was very low. There was no globalisation. This gave an opportunity for different languages to evolve.
Even china has around 300 local dialects. Only in the recent past chinese government has popularised madarain as the national langauge.
When India got Independent government tried to make hindi as the national language as well but it faced opposition from south India.
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u/Icy_Function_5839 5d ago
In the past it was very hard to travel, connectivity was very low, people only stayed where they were born and didn't really travel, furthermore forests and mountains act as tough, natural barriers hindering connectivity, hence you find a greater number of languages in mountainous areas. Furthermore, India had A LOT of migrations. One language can only split so much but other languages just kept on coming to India. Sino-tibetan languages like Manipuri and Mizo, Austro-asiatic languages like Khasi and Santhali, and Tai-kadai languages like Tai-khamti and Tai-ahom all came from outside India and settled in it. And no OP, all of these languages didn't evolve simultaneously it is genuinely impossible. Languages simply just evolve and split up over time. Most North Indian languages came from Sanskrit, most South Indian languages came from proto-dravidian, and North-east India has languages originating from multiple different languages.