Why do Indians want Hindi to be an official language of the UN (similarly to Spanish and Arabic being there despite no...

bengali actually.
Technically Bengali is the national language of bangladesh and a scheduled language in India, meaning it has the same status as hindi in terms of being protected by the state.

I can walk into a government officee and ask them to give me a form in bengali if I was being a cunt and they would have to comply (in theory).

>languages
yeah, the UN Security council increasingly looks out of place in a new multipolar world.

Check'd.

The funny thing is that Turks and Bangladeshis are also pushing for Turkish and Bengali, which is even more ridiculous.

Less laughable is Portuguese's push, which I bet would have been accepted already if it wasn't so similar to Spanish (and thus unintentionally seen as somewhat redundant by some people). Then again, the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are two separate languages is a travesty by itself.

Bengali is closer to Hindi than other Indian languages, isn't it? Does your distaste of Hindi stem from seen it as poorly spoken Bengali or is it different enough that you wouldn't notice the similarities?

>Turks are also pushing for Turkish
Blame Erdogan for that.

>the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are two separate languages is a travesty by itself.
Blame the Eternal Anglo for that.

Not him, but imagine if French was imposed on Spain. There's a lot of similarity in grammar and syntax, but there's a clear enough difference that two people who only spoke one or the other wouldn't understand each other except for maybe every fifth word they might misunderstand anyway.

I'm not asking why he doesn't want to be forced to learn/speak Hindi, that is self-explanatory.

I'm asking about such comments as
>schoolchildren learn to hate hindi because it is fucking garbage.
which show he also dislikes the language itself besides the cultural imperialism.

I would also inquire a Frenchman if he expressed that he personally disliked Spanish.

>I would also inquire a Frenchman if he expressed that he personally disliked Spanish.
Or the reverse, to follow your example.

not really.
Most North and east indian languages originate from pali and spin off into their own languages from there.
Southern indian languages are a completely different family of languages. Bengali is extremely similar to Assamese and Oriya, kinda like spanish and portuguese.
Marathi and Gujarati are similar to each other as well.

people in India detest hindi because it is seen as a largely inferior language that hasn't produced works of literature on par with the rest of major indian languages. For bengalis it causes even more butthurt because of the bengal renaissance and flowering of literature. During islamic times bengal was a backwater province that most muslim governors didn't prefer to go to.

Hindi was looked down upon and urdu/persian was promoted in northern india. Eastern india also had a sufi tradition that helped keep the works of literature churning out in bangla.

Post independence, the Indian government stuck it's nose in everyone's business and started to make major changes to the hindi language to make sure it would be the national language of india. This had the result of everyone being unhappy and there were language riots in Madras which ended up making the current language setup that we see in India today.

While the government of india has an official policy of hindi promotion, it doesn't do that because people don't like their culture dominated by others, especially if it is perceived as inferior.

When I mean that its fucking garbage, is that when I was growing up, we used to have a hindi seminar in our school.

I was a little hothead and caused a minor ruckus because a teacher was reciting a poem that she had composed. My parents got called for that. Bitch said that every other language in India were guests, but hindi was the actual owner of the house.

Its ironic because I had a good grasp of sanskrit and could write passably good hindi prose-since a lot of high north indian languages, all use sanskrit loanwords.

>Arabic and Chinese are UN languages
>German is not

please read what I wrote.
I need the (You)s

If I have to guess, it's probably because it's being taught in an officially mandated way, stripping it bare of some things so it's more palatable to a bureaucracy than anything else. To carry on the example, like a Spaniard who hated French as dictated to him by the state's official French language board or whatever, as opposed to his friends and family who speak it as natives.

Actually now that I think on it, it might be more like the English-Spanish divide between Latino immigrants and nativist Americans.

there is actually nothing inherently bureaucratic about the way hindi is taught in India. Its the same as english or any other local language because most states have their own frameworks and education policies.

Arabic makes sense considering how extensive it is as an official language across several countries. Chinese less so, but it makes some sense since there's not really an alternative official language in East Asia besides English, which they don't do as well with.

German, I think, isn't counted as much because any country that has German as an official language would also have English, French, or Russian as an official language as well.

That's what the losers of WWII get for losing.

Russian - Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Transnistria, Donetsk People's Republic, Luhansk People's Republic, Abkhazia, South Ossetia.

>Transnistria, Donetsk People's Republic, Luhansk People's Republic, Abkhazia, South Ossetia.
I forgot that Russia can meme nations into existence, and would get away with it if it wasn't for that pesky security council.

It makes me wonder, would a balkanized Russia or China make Russian or Chinese more attractive? Would a united Latin America make Spanish less attractive?

I think the diaspora of both languages has an impact. Even if all of South America was united there'd still be Spanish speakers in Europe and North America. Same with Russian, which has plenty of native speakers in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Thanks for the insight. I knew non-Hindi native speakers in India weren't too fond of Hindi, but I had never had the chance to learn the reasons.

Would Hindi have stayed a regional language with the same spread as any other if it hadn't been artificially sanskritized? And what was the prestige language/lingua franca in the subcontinent before the Mughals?

The funny thing is that Latino immigrants generally completely Americanize within 2 generations (3rd generations barely speaking Spanish anymore), and the only reason they're seen as not integrating is that new immigrants keep flowing.

The Indian government used to be far more heavy handed when India was newly independent. The rise of regional parties have made that obsolete, so as far as language goes, India is in a pretty good spot right now.

>would hindi have stayed...
Hindi as we know it consists of several dialects which are pretty distant. A guy in Western UP and eastern bihar will barely be able to understand each other, despite speaking the same language.

Sanskritizing the language made it easier to spread and study, but also made it lose much of it's nuances. Its like what the french did post revolution.

>lingua franca
I am going to assume you mean the muslims rather than the mughals.

Pre mughal, the lingua franca was Sanskrit. In bengal for example, when the Senas came to power, the first thing they did to cement their rule was to invite a particular group of brahmins to settle in Bengal, which is where my family originates from.

Pali/prakrit was the more base version of sanskrit and was the progenitor of all the non dravidian languages in India. Which is why the grammatical rules and word construction for those languages are still similar, and the written version is easy to get into.

Mandarin is used by a Great Power in the UNSC and 800 million people know it.

>I am going to assume you mean the muslims rather than the mughals.
I honestly didn't know the Mughals weren't the first Muslims to get there. I also didn't know Sanskrit had survived in use as late as the 12th century. I think I'll take this chance delve into Indian history for a while.

>Pali/prakrit was the more base version of sanskrit
Is it like the Vulgar Latin of Sanskrit?

>800 million people know it.
Almost 900 million people know it natively alone.

>Arabic makes sense considering how extensive it is as an official language across several countries.
I'd argue that Arabic makes the least amount of sense out of all official UN languages.

said this already, but nobody really speaks Modern Standard Arabic. It is the only Arabic language written anywhere it's official, but it's archaic and you can expect it to die within a few decades as (hopefully) the Middle East develops and vernacular literature becomes a thing.

The UN originally only had 5 languages (the current ones minus Arabic) as "official", two of which (English and French) were also "working languages". This made sense considering French was still the language of diplomacy at the time, though already well in the way of being phased out by English.

Spanish, Russian and Chinese were slowly included over time as working languages (in that order), and Arabic was finally added in the 70s, sponsored by Arab oilbux.

Now, I'm not quite sure why Spanish was one of the original official languages, but the other ones were no-brainers when you consider the permanent members of the security council (i.e., the people who ran the UN).

The funny thing is that, by all intents and purposes, the winners of WWII (and thus the great powers of the time) were only the US, the USSR and the British Empire. The Eternal Anglo convinced the US to include France as one of the winners to get more German clay before partition, and the US additionally included China (then the Republic of China) as a winner of the Pacific theater to have another extra ally against the Soviets (funny how that backfired).

Fast forwarding to the present, Germany and Japan (i.e. the losers) are glaringly obvious absences in the SC, followed by emerging powers such as India and Brazil. By contrast, hasty additions France and China make a lot more sense nowadays than Russia, who's currently struggling to keep relevance.

>great power
we aren't playing a paradox game.
Out of the 5 countries that use chinese as an official language 4 are tiny city states.
Even as far as soft power grows, India has had china beat because of the cultural outreach of bollywood (despite the quality of it's current fims).
>800 million people.
As of 2011, 41.03% of India spoke Hindi, and it was the primary language spoken in India. This number will grow up as the states speaking in Hindi have a higher fertility rate than non hindi speaking ones and as the population of India increases in general.

It is far more deserving of a "official language" status than something like arabic or russian. I personally think that this is a waste of time as I mentioned it here.

I always assumed Spanish and Arabic were in there because the UNSC wanted the countries that were going to have problems to be able to read about what was going to happen to them.

Arabic second language speaker here. MSA is still legible to everyone with a secondary education in the Arab World. It uses grammatical forms not commonly vocalized and a range of technical vocabulary as well, but any college graduate going into an interview is expected to be able to speak a sort of hybrid of MSA and whatever regional dialect both parties speak. It's actually quite sensible to have Arabic, since all the fucking problems seem to be in Arabic-speaking countries, which also happen to have the lowest English proficiency rates in the world.

Hindu nationalism is on the rise, read more about it on relevant current world issues boards.

And unintentionally French has taken on a similar use since it's literally irrelevant for everywhere outside Africa.

French wasn't a hasty addition, it was a no-brainer. It was the language of diplomacy, an official language of every international organisation in the world, and France's participation was essential to the UN, something that wouldn't have happened if it had been insulted by having its language excluded like that.

t. Arundhati "Muslim women were gestating for 3.141 weeks" Roy.

>Out of the 5 countries that use chinese as an official language 4 are tiny city states.
Taiwan is not a city state, it's about the size of the Netherlands.

>Even as far as soft power grows, India has had china beat because of the cultural outreach of bollywood
Are you serious? As much as I hate it, China has money in so many places, it can enforce its will in many different ways.

For example:
-Hollywood movies censoring themselves for a chance to be screened in China and get money from the huge Chinese audiences.
-China censoring Miss World's Canadian candidate (who has heavily criticized the CCP and the PRC in general) by virtue of having invested enough in Miss World to hold in in Chinese soil (and being able to deny entry to said candidate).
-China being able to arrest political critics on neighboring countries like Thailand by asking the authorities to do so (probably through political deals and bribes higher up).

The list goes on and on.

>which also happen to have the lowest English proficiency rates in the world.
Really now? My experience with Middle Easterners was that they were quite good at English.

>are you serious
china started throwing it's money around africa in 2000.

>hollywood movies
which are a product designed to be sold to foreign markets. Hollywood target's the chinese market which is protected by the chinese state. It's a business decision, not the PRC throwing it's economic clout at hollywood.

As a counterpoint, HBO India doesn't show Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in india, despite it being legal in India, because the audience would react poorly to it.

Soft power has a cultural component to it. India has had china beat in it because for most of the cold war era, hollywood movies were too expensive in african countries and most of the middle east. Indian movies were cheap and were screened there, which over time helped in increasing the soft power of India. The PRC entered it too late and is focused on high profile work, which doesn't necessarily yield the best results.

India was also helped by the NAM movement which made it famous in africa for example. As those countries emerge and as India engages with african nations, this soft power will increase influentially.

Nearly every older middle eastern dude has had watched bollywood movies in his lifetime. China simply doesn't have the time investment that India has.

depends on where you are in the middle east.

If you break it region by region, Hindi is spoken across South Asia region by nearly a billion people.

Thats 1/7th of the world population.

In the coming decades, India/China will dominate global trade along with US/Euro. So its pretty relevant.

Another thing about hindi is that Urdu and hindi are similar languages. Urdu consists of hindi grammar and persian loanwords, and as such you can understand what a person says in urdu if you know hindi.

It's not exactly that, otherwise Polish would be too.

>polen

>As a counterpoint, HBO India doesn't show Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in india, despite it being legal in India, because the audience would react poorly to it.
Don't you see the difference? One is censoring a movie on a domestic market, the other one is censoring a movie on a global market. No matter what the Indians think of that movie, it still got made. Sure, it's a business decision either way, but unless you see American studios censoring themselves to appease Indian audiences, the scales are completely incomparable.

Now, I honestly don't know how far reaching Bollywood has been in the Middle East and Africa, but unless it has inspired foreigners to learn Hindustani on the same level that anime and K-dramas has inspired people to learn Japanese and Korean, I think China has a better chance of building cultural influence in a short amount of time through Chinese made media (which is their plan now after seeing their neighbors success on these fronts). There's already wide interest in Mandarin as a language, a little push through interest in entertainment could put it above many traditionally sought foreign languages. The only real obstacle I see is the stigma people have when dealing with communist-made and censored media.

I'm pretty sure Hindi and Urdu combined reach about half a billion of total number of speakers.

They filled the Slavic quota with Russian m8.

In all seriousness, Poland is probably not there because the Anglos couldn't figure out a way to a) justify it to the Russians and b) guarantee that Poland would remain an ally to them. If they could ensure both things, you can bet even a meme country like Poland would be on the SC.

>global market
They are pandering it to the chinese audience which makes up a major part of foreign movies and are guarded by a state that actively censors ANYTHING negative about china. At that point you are better off showing a few scenes that show how good china is and you get a movie that gets access to the chinese market.

Case in point. A mission impossible movie where Manlet rescues his wife from shanghai wasn't shown in china because they showed some shadier areas of the city. It's the same reason why capeshit has extra scenes showing china to be as relevant as the US. Case in point the one of the avenger's films has iron manlet address PRC kids.

On the other hand the second Avenger's movie begins with calcutta shown as mogadishu tier, and it did business successfully in India, because the Indian government only censors stuff that cause religious disharmony or shows people smoking.

>unless.

Old USSR states and several african nations have quite few people who understand hindi passably and know several older bollywood songs. You can even watch russian dubs of bollywood films in russia.

>huge interest
because the PRC doesn't use english as an official language of communication and their level of english proficiency is far lower than that of India. Doing business in china practically requires a working knowledge of Mandarin.
Doing business in India just requires you to know english.
Are you going to say that fanmade chinese translations of total war games on steam workshop are also examples of soft power?

Hindi alone has over half a billion speakers and the number is expected to go up because India's population has only just begun to stabilize.
Also pakis breed like rabbits.

You're missing the point.

a) Being able to influence foreign films in their own country is a great example of "soft power". The US could never hope of censoring an Indian or Chinese movie, yet China has Hollywood by the balls.

b) Dubs are great and all, but real cultural interest begins with linguistic interest. If you say that Soviets watched Russian dubs of Bollywood movies, they were divorced from true exposure to Indian culture by at least one extra degree of separation. Cultural exposure doesn't really count as soft power unless it creates vested interest in said culture, and that is generally expressed to (at the very least, interest in) language acquisition.

c) It is true that Hindi is seen as less relevant because English is widely used in China, but that is not the only reason. Hindi loses the interest of a lot of people also because even in its own country it's still only a regional language. It would be one thing if Hindustani really was a lingua franca throughout the whole subcontinent, but if it's only really usable in Pakistan and north Indian states, its usefulness in the eyes of foreigners is even further diminished.

>Are you going to say that fanmade chinese translations of total war games on steam workshop are also examples of soft power?
This is a complete non-sequitur.

>Hindi alone has over half a billion speakers
What are your sources? Are you sure that's not Hindustani as a whole?

>Dubs are great and all
>2299
Nice.

>What are your sources? Are you sure that's not Hindustani as a whole?
I posted the 2011 amount of language speakers from the Indian government.
India's population has gone up by a lot since then. Hindi alone is more than half a billion by now.

>yet china has hollywood by the balls.
Hollywood added extra scenes to chinese screenings of films so that they would be passed in china. How is that an example of soft power?
your example of the miss world contest was a better example.

>real cultural interest begins

world.time.com/2011/08/15/how-a-late-bollywood-icon-saved-this-correspondents-life/

ibtimes.com/bollywood-west-africa-nigerias-love-fascination-indian-cinema-video-1169057

you have examples of countries

alright anecdotal evidence, but it just goes to show exactly how popular bollywood is and remains in the third world and the middle east. I have interacted with many arab students to the surprise of americans because we can talk about bollywood movies.

I was in ethiopia for over a year and half the hoardings for smaller shops had bollywood actresses on them. Just because you don't read about them in your local newspaper doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

>its a regional language
It's the official language of India along with english.
The reason why it's not used for a business perspective in India is because

>India has a population that can read and understand english
>the indian market targeted by global corporations has a good knowledge of english.

some sources
theworldreporter.com/2013/08/bollywood-diplomacy-influence-in-soviet-union.html

bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17920845

thenational.ae/uae/bollywood-craze-grows-ever-stronger-with-audiences-in-the-middle-east

bump

Why aren't you fuckers focusing on what it's important. Relevant languages are spanish and english and chinese (in that order). The first two will let you understand most of western languages, and chinese is relevant by itself.
>inb4 germanic attemps of written comunication
NO

>chinese is relevant by itself
why?
because the PRC has had a generation of huge economic growth?

Chinese was an UN official language long before that.

>because the PRC has had a generation of huge economic growth?
Yes. Besides, it is cosmovision in itself

what?

Chinese is geographically isolated to one part of the world. It has regional relevance, sure. But it isn't globally as important as everyone is making it out to be.

>Spanish
>more relevant than English

Spanish will soon be the primary language of the US. and then, the world!

I'm pretty sure I replied to this yesterday with a rather long post, but it seems it wasn't actually posted. Fuck me.

I couldn't find the 2011 sources you mention, but I did the math using the 2001 ones I could find and, using the population growth rates from North Indian states, arrived at about 530 mill. total Hindi speakers 15 years later (>current year), so I guess you're right.

What I mean by Hindi being a regional language is that it isn't even used within its whole nation, but only in the northern part of it. This obviously means that, between making the effort of learning Hindi even though it's mostly only used in in the northern region of India, or just going with English which is used throughout the whole country (even if by fewer people), people will consider that it is indeed unnecessary to learn Hindi.

As for Bollywood, my point still stands. If it isn't driving foreigners to learn Hindi, it isn't doing enough to promote Indian culture overseas. It may be doing a lot, but not enough. Especially when you consider the huge effects Japanese and Korean media have had at inspiring foreigners to start learning those languages.

The UN should just make all languages official languages provided that there are translators. It's the "United Nations" after all, there shouldn't be any preference.

>2001.
>2016
there has been a lot of difference since then. Hindi has the status of an official language of India, and as the TFR of southern India continues to drop, hindi will keep becoming more prominent in India. Internal migration also helps with that. India of 2016 isn't the India of 1960.

>if they aren't learning the language.
But they are. They sing bollywood songs, they speak some form of broken hindi and know how to greet Indians coming to africa by saying 'namaste' and the like. Just because it is not as easily available to see online as weeaboos or k-pop fans doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Meanwhile chinese is and remains a language that people learn for the ease of doing business with china, and is spoken in a geographically limited zone, the same as hindi.

>Let's have irrelevant languages like Lithuanian be official while languages spoken by a bazillion people like Javanese don't get to because their speakers haven't declared statehood.
Alternatively
>Let's include every single language in the world, it doesn't matter if they die within a generation.

No thanks. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that some languages are more equal than others.

...

>there has been a lot of difference since then.
Well, yeah. That's why I did the projections for 15 years and arrived at 530 mill, why else would I do that?

>Hindi has the status of an official language of India
And even then despite the fact that it is official in a major nation, it hasn't been able to reach enough relevance to be spoken even by most citizens of that nation. That's the whole point.

As it stands, Hindi doesn't have more relevance than Bengal or Tamil.

>they speak some form of broken hindi
I was about to concede that I didn't know this until you kept on and said
>and know how to greet Indians coming to africa by saying 'namaste' and the like.

You do know that everyone and their mom knows that word, right? It's like saying Chinese media is responsible for the wide knowledge of "ni hao" and "xie xie". I'm willing to bet more people know "namaste" from Yoga than from Bollywood.

In any case, if there really is some widespread drive to learn Hindi out of interest in Bollywood, then I would agree that you're right and that interest in Indian culture is being spread through Bollywood.

>projection
I wonder if you included internal migration in those populations.
Ideally we should be discussing them in 2021, or use the 2011 census values.

>as it stands.
It is far more relevant than bengali or tamil becausse the government of India defacto uses it in official communications, and it is the largest spoken language in the country.
I don't believe it to be necessary to be included in the UN as I mentioned a long time ago, but it is far more relevant than the arabic in today's world like.

>every one and their mom
and does everyone and their mom know of mother India? Why do people in the middle east and sub saharan africa know about "Sholay"?

People are exposed to Indian culture and values via bollywood, and they end up recognizing and adapting to it in some part or the other. I would say that is an example of indian culture being spread through bollywood. The PRC for all it's maximum spend doesn't have that yet.

WCs aren't really popular in India user.

>There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that some languages are more equal than others.

A lot is wrong though. some languages only get grovelled up because they were worth a shit in the past or inflated numbers.

Why not Sanskrit?

because it is as alive latin.

as alive as latin, sorry.

Supremacist notions aside, it would make sense considering the only tongues with more speakers are Mandarin Chinese and English with Spanish having around an equal number but more widespread. To be fair it would be necessary to include Urdu as well.

French is gonna loose ground to Arabic due to the fact that former French colonies are speaking other vernacular languages.
Portuguese might as well be given a spot along with Malay/Indonesian.
Notice how none of the losers of WW2 were included.

>Even as far as soft power grows, India has had china beat because of the cultural outreach of bollywood

China has India beat because of WuShu and martial arts and Kung Fu films - any European, American, or even other Asian would be far more familiar with Bruce Lee over any Bollywood actor or film.

>Even as far as soft power grows, India has had china beat because of the cultural outreach of bollywood (despite the quality of it's current fims).
Negro what?

I can't name an Indian actor for shit meanwhile in the Chinese speaking world I can give you Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan, Jet li, Zhang Ziyi, Gong li, and that "we need the Chinese audience" actress, Fan Bingbing. Directors being the Cheng Kaige, Zhang Yimou, the Shaw Brothers, and John Woo. And I come from hicksville, Wisconsin.

All I know of bollywood are meme dances in the middle of the film.

If they did expand the security council who do you think they should add?

I think India and Germany should both added.

Maybe Iran too.

In Africa language shift in educaction will occur as they get better education.

Hong kong is not china you dumb fuck

>I wonder if you included internal migration in those populations.
I used population growth numbers for northern Indian states, so I believe migration should be accounted for. Like I said, I couldn't find the 2011 figures, so if you could provide them it would appreciated.

>It is far more relevant than bengali or tamil becausse the government of India defacto uses it in official communications
But both Bengal and Tamil are used as official languages in other countries besides being regional languages for huge amounts of people in India. And these countries are also big on English use, so they even share the same disadvantages.

>but it is far more relevant than the arabic in today's world
I wonder about that. On one hand, Arabic is sort of, kind of, used as a lingua franca on a huge swath of land from Morocco all the way to Iraq, it's official in more countries than any other language besides English and French, and tons of people learn it (at least to the point of being able to read it) as a liturgical language. On the other hand, it isn't really one single language, and nobody's mother language is "Literary Arabic". Then again, official UN languages are mostly used for written purposes, in which case "Literary Arabic" starts making sense again.

In any case, I find it hard to make a case that Hindi, or even Hindustani as a whole, is more relevant than Arabic. Hindi does have more speakers and India is indeed more relevant than any single Arabic nation, but the Arab world as a whole is, to my chagrin, a major world influence because of religion.

Hindi might become more important if it gets a better foothold in non-Hindi speaking areas of India and India keeps growing to a great power, but I think the "they can speak English anyway"-label will be hard to shed for a good while. Perhaps if Hindi ends up becoming the most spoken language by the end of this century?

Sanskrit should be brought up to replaces Hindi desu.

And Latin should also be brought back to replace English and French desu.

And while we're at it, we might as well bring back Ancient Greek and Old Persian and Old Chinese to get rid of Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin, respectively.

Maybe even bring back Nahuatl to replace Spanish.

A retro UN would be very cool.

West Africa is becoming more French, not less.

It kind is, though, unless you're stuck in the early 90s.

>when the ROC reclaims its rightful rule of the entirety of China, the permanent members of the UNSC will all have red, white and blue flags.
How will you celebrate, Veeky Forums?

>West Africa is becoming more French, not less.

That's if they stick to educating in French (not really a good move due to various issues)
It's much better to invest in local languages and gradual multilingualism to English.

>It's much better to invest in local languages
There's like a bazillion languages in west Africa, they don't have the resources. Education is already given in French in Sub-Saharan West Africa, and it has been for a long time. The Maghreb has French competing in Arabic, but even so, vast portions of the educated population from the region speak French.

I don't understand what issues you're talking about.

I wonder if the UK can survive united or Russia can survive at all until it happens (if it ever does).

Because doing a baptism by fire by teaching them only French and ignoring local languages fucks up school performances alongside teacher lack of language education.

Instead of doing French/English from the start there's much better ways to implement local language in education and later on introduce the students to the foreign language latter with a firm and great foundation in their mother toungue.

www0.sun.ac.za/taalsentrum/assets/files/ML Afr Lang & Cost.pdf

You have o give the kids a good basis in their native toungue before going on to French/English (they'll need English to compete globally later on) because you'll have kids who lose their mother toungue or are functionally retarded in it.

Also India has just as many languages but they manage to do local/nation language education right. Many of the people who say it can't be done are locals who give such a massive prestige to foreign tongues without realizing that education and contributing to the growth of a languages by making literature, media in that language.

Afrikaners made Afrikaans into it's own language in recognition because they gave it prestige and made material in that language and made it legit and supported it's growth so instead of it just being a bastard off growth of 15016th century dutch with bastard influence from Asian and African language.

I'm pretty sure even India only has schools in major regional languages, not in every single one of the supposed hundreds it has. French is already widely spoken in cities (which is where kids get access to education either way) so they're probably already competent in French before starting formal education. It is entirely possible to learn stuff in a foreign language, even if overtime it kills your mother language (which is how minor languages have been treated forever). Modern nation states killing linguistic diversity isn't anything new.

>It's is entirely possible to learn stuff in a foreign language

It's harder though and takes more time and effort for less results. A gradual approach from local languages to the language of education makes the switch easier and gives kids a better foundation. Try learning a university lecture in Finnish and understanding the material in the seam time you would your mother tongue.

That's how they do it in many nations and it provides steller results.

>steller results
I can see you must have first hand experience.

Hindi makes much more sense than Arabic.

20-30 years from now I expect Hindi to be much more prominent on a global stage, while Russian , Arabic, and French fade into obscurity.

I am starting to get worried about UK's spot in the UNSC as well. If the country starts to fall apart post-Brexit than I struggle to see why they should remain on the council. Entire system needs major reform, WW2 ended 70 years ago.

>Focuses on HK
>When I said Chinese speaking world
Also note that I threw in mainland & Taiwanese directors & actors. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige are from the meme 5th Wave of Chinese Directors (the Mainland cunts that emerged Post-Mao) and Jet Li, Gong Li, and Zhang Ziyi are also from the mainland.

Doesnt really matter anyway since Taiwan/HK/Mainland share directors and actors ever since Chinkdom opened up. All contribute to making Chink culture known abroad more than your ass.

Stellar*

There are you happy?!

>martial arts and kung fu films
you would have a point if europe and america were completely saturated with chinese films about kung fu to the extent that it began influencing the local culture of the place
>inb4 blaxploitation.

Meanwhile afghanistan, pakistan, nearly all of the middle east apart from israel and large parts of subsaharan africa, the parts where the media tells you china is gaining influence still watch bollywood movies on the regular. Their hoardings are filled with actors from bollywood, and people bother your by asking if you can sing (insert generic bollywood song here).

>so I believe migration should be accounted for.
Internal migration that is seasonal would take that into account. People immigrating to other parts of india also add a lot.
the indian government hasn't released it, so nvm. 2001 is the oldest we have, even though internal demographics of india have doubtless changed since then.

>official languages in other countries.
national language of bangladesh IIRC. I am going by the total number of speakers and the cultural influence it has in the current year.

>arabic
the total number of arabic speakers isn't that high and /pol/ memes aside first world countries aren't going to adapt it any time soon.
>liturgical language.
Might as well include latin at that point desu.

>they can speak english anyway.
which is the biggest roadblock. I personally believe its largely bureaucratic inertia that makes india petition for the inclusion of hindi as an official language, but you can make a good point for hindi being an official language based on the criteria that chinese languages are officially used in the UN.

minor languages are alive in india because of social and familial reasons, and the indian government didn't have the sort of autism that the french did with making everything parisian french.

>university lecture
You do realize we're talking about starting to learn the other language as children, right? As early as kindergarten if possible, but as late as around 7 years old at the latest. If children are taught the language first and foremost, and are able to use it with their peers (especially if the area is so linguistically diverse that said language is actually necessary as a lingua franca), they'll pick it up in no time and we'll be able to continue with the syllabus from then on like any other children elsewhere. What's more, being already bilingual helps in learning a third language (English).

Sure, but what I'm saying is that there are no schools in minors languages, or are there? As far as I know there's only schools in scheduled languages, which are only a tiny fraction of the languages within India.

French and Arabic are both projected to grow, actually. Countries in West Africa, many of which speak French to some capacity (and in many of which French is growing in relevance as a lingua franca), have the highest fertility rates in the world. The Arab world is growing relatively less, but isn't that far behind either.

Russian is indeed dying, though, in more ways than one. Russia itself is declining (to the point that many people believe Putin's lifetime to be the Federation's lifetime), and while its struggles to reclaim regional power status haven't completely been wasted, it's still losing influence in nearby states and Russian is losing importance as a lingua franca in its periphery because of English. It doesn't help that Russia itself has a very low population growth.

Depending on Hindi's developments within India and India's developments as a regional power, Hindi will most definitely surpass Russian in the near future, but it will remain to be seen how it will fair against Arabic and French. Then again, unless the spread of English is somehow slowed down in the near future, chances are that all languages other than English will start becoming redundant and the "official languages" thing will start being nothing more than a meme.