It looks all but certain that my wife and I will be moving to Bangalore, India for a few years. The ink isn’t dry on the deal yet, but everyone above her in her firm seems supportive and enthusiastic about her new role. As soon as we know for sure, there will be a large post in a new thread looking for all kinds of advice for living in India, maintaining our home here…all that good stuff. This is not that post.
We’re trying to figure out which Indian language would be most useful for us to learn a little. I am 52, my wife is 56, so we’re under no illusions that we’ll become fluent, but I figure it’s a good idea to pick up something that will be beneficial.
The two strongest candidates would seem to be Hindi, for its wide-spread use throughout India, and Kannada, because it is the local language. Being a city that draws people from all over India, Hindi would seem to be something of a lingua franca, and also the most potentially useful for travel within India. On the other hand, I would guess that Kannada would be more useful for dealing with shopkeepers, domestic help, and everyday interactions in Bangalore.
I’m not going to try to learn two unrelated languages; that’s too much for me. So, anyone have any educated opinions as to which language to attempt? You know what? I’ll take uneducated opinions as well. Thanks!
English is the language that seems to be used at our office, but we are an American company. Everyone speaks English and most speak Hindi, but not everyone I work with speaks Kannada.
But since you’re going to be living in Bangalore I would learn Kannada. English will work most everywhere, so Hindi would somewhat duplicate that. But Kannada is the local language and that would be fun to have in your toolkit. I think you’ll get more bang for your buck by learning Kannada.
Thanks - that’s what I was leaning toward, if only slightly. I realized that, when we travel outside of Bangalore, we will predominantly be interacting with service industry workers, most of whom I would expect to know enough English to get by. All of our friends in Banagalore speak excellent English. Kannada would seem to open up the opportunity for better communication with native Bangaloreans (is that the right adjective?).
There is absolutely no need to learn any other language. English will do just fine even with domestic help. I grew up in India and know Hindi and Bengali but no Kannada. Have gone to Bangalore since 1997 - never had any problems.
You will probably live in a walled community with other “white folks” and inside the wall it will feel just like the US but with better food, domestic help and great plants/birds.
Back packed through out India for several months and never had any problem using English to communicate with. You might be surprised how fluent the average man (or women) on the street is in English. Say what you will about the British Raj, but it sure gave India a common language, English.
The other thing is that even if you speak Hindi to some one, they will invariably speak English back to you.
Hindi in general is not well received in the South. There was violent resistance in the 1950s over the attempt to impose Hindi as the nationwide standard language. Tamils incinerating themselves in protest. Language riots. The only national language the Dravidian southerners would accept was English. Stick with Kannada. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you not to learn other languages besides English. More linguistic knowledge is always better than less.
Besides, not everyone knows English. Unless you isolate yourself from regular Indian people behind high walls like a colonial sahib and never go on the street, from time to time you’ll encounter people who don’t speak English. Admittedly, that’s less likely in Bangalore of all places, which is known for its high educational levels. But someday you may wish to travel in the country.
Hindi is generally useful in the background because it’s found on labels on nationally distributed goods and heard on national TV broadcasting, but don’t expect to be speaking it down South. Except when I was in Hyderabad, I watched a lot of TV broadcasts in Hindi, but that may be because in Hyderabad city Urdu is spoken, which is actually the exact same language as Hindi under the hood, only with different detailing and paint job.
Yup, I have lived in India for short periods of time off and on totaling up to over two years now, and I concur about learning Kannada and, if you can manage it, some Hindi. (I know you said you wouldn’t learn two, but c’mon, one and a half, or one and a third? And if you’ll be there for a few years, you can do it!)
Learning Kannada will not only be useful and neighborly as a way to interact with locals, but will also give you some grounding for at least recognizing the other more major Dravidian languages and scripts of South India, namely Tamil and Telugu.
And Hindi as an Indo-European language will be a bit more recognizable to a native English speaker (in fact, if you think about it for a minute you probably can already figure out what the sequence of Hindi words * ek do teen char panch cheh saat aat nau das* means). Also, the standard nagari script used for writing Hindi is identical or similar to the scripts used for almost all other North Indian languages.
With English, a Dravidian language, and some Hindi, you can go pretty much anywhere at all in India and probably never be more than two degrees of separation away from somebody you can successfully communicate with, except maybe in remoter villages. And you won’t ever end up just feeling illiterate. (If there’s one thing I hate in a foreign country, it’s not having any idea what any of the writing means. I can deal with not knowing or only minimally knowing the language, but when I don’t even know how the letters mean words it makes me feel super stupid.)
By the way, nagari script is also useful to know if you feel like learning any Sanskrit, which I heartily recommend even if you don’t think you want to. Having some familiarity with Sanskrit in India is kind of like having some familiarity with Latin in Europe: (1) many of the modern regional languages are directly descended from it, (2) it’s an ancient classical and learned language in which tons of important literature is written, (3) since antiquity it has helped shape a shared historical/cultural heritage over many different linguistic regions, and (4) it’s contributed tons of loanwords and grammatical practices even to the regional languages from different language families (e.g., Latin to the Finno-Ugric languages in Europe, Sanskrit to the Dravidian languages in India). It’s also a beautiful language in its own right.
If my analogous experience is any help to you, I sometimes hear my wife speaking four languages in an hour, and certainly all four every day…:
– English, to me
–Chavacano, to her family on the phone
–Visaya, to working class people around the neighborhood
–Tagalog to others, as there are many words she doesn’t know in Visaya
So, there would have been no useful answer if I had asked which of those to familiarize myself with in advance. I would expect India to be very similar.
The Kannada alphabet is similar to the Telugu alphabet; once you’ve learned one, the other will come easily. The Tamil alphabet is very different, but fortunately it’s the easiest of all Indian alphabets to learn. Malayalam is very closely related to Tamil, but the Malayalam alphabet is fiendishly complicated; it uses many conjunct consonants (ligatures) that are not predictable or analyzable into their component letters. Tamil is blessedly free from conjunct consonants. Kannada and Telugu have… reasonably learnable conjunct consonants.
You’ll have to get used to the word alphabet in Indian English being used to mean a single alphabetic character, instead of the whole set of characters. AFAIK, the only word for the whole set of characters is still “alphabet,” so try not to get confused.
I was all over India in 2005 for several weeks on a dignitary/humanitarian detail. No matter where we were, large cities, villages, etc, we never once ran into any locals who did not speak fluent English. And we spoke to a lot of people during that tine.
Hm. When I traveled through Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the mid-1980s, I came across tons of Indians who didn’t speak English or Hindi. Ordinary folks, not in the service-to-foreigners industries. Hindi just isn’t very useful down South.*
*With the exception of Hyderabad city, where spoken Hindi is interchangeable with spoken Urdu.
If you’re going to be staying in a place for an extended time, learning the local language is very much worth your while.
This is the important point. Learning a second language isn’t needed; English will suffice for 99.9% of the interactions a Westerner will need in Bangalore. But learning the local language will enable you to deeply enhance your experience, converse with people that you normally wouldn’t, and demonstrate respect for the local culture.
Thanks, everyone, particularly Johanna for the history lesson. I was not aware of that particular wrinkle.
I have visited India a half-dozen times or so, mostly Bangalore, so I am aware that one can get by pretty well on English only, but I’d like to try to do a little better than, “getting by.” It just seems polite, if nothing else, to learn a local language if I’m going to be living in another country for an extended time.
Of course, everything like this is on hold at my wife’s firm, so who knows how long it will be until this all gets arranged, if at all. :-/
