this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Many indians speak 4+ languages easily , and we dont even notice that 😅
Isn't India in Asia
Last I checked.
Fun fact: when you say "Asian" to an American, their first thought is East or Southeast Asia, but a British person's primary association with "Asianness", for lack of a better term, is India and Pakistan.
I did not know that, interesting.
Do they refer to East Asians as “oriental” then?
Only the very old and/or racist ones do afaik
Wait why? They're literally in the Orient
We don't call it that anymore. Haven't for decades.
As for the why, the time when that term was in regular use was a time with a lot of anti-asian bigotry and most of the people who refuse to stop using it are the same ones who use other outdated terms/slurs for non-white and non-western people, so it has tons of negative connotations..
My mom complained that the ramen she likes isn't called Oriental anymore.
SIGH
Geographically it is a subcontinent that slammed into Asia to form the Himalayas, so you could make the argument it is its own thing.
That's like arguing nothing is its own thing cause they used to be one continent.
Clearly, this dude voted to become mr. worldwide
India and Pakistan are considered to be in Asia but more accurately they are considered to be in the Indian Subcontinent. The same way Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest are also considered to be in Asia but they are more accurately considered to be on the Middle East.
SEA PROBABLY , however India , pakistan , sri lanka and bangladesh are considered a subcontinent coz similar cultures , and are different from rest of asia !
Not to take away from this but often these 4 are very similar languages that could be easily interpreted as dialects if not the identity politics.
Well most indian languages are not even mutually intelligible so idk if its about identity politics or what not !
It is complicated. India has at least four language families - Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. So Hindi (I-E) is closer related to English or Greek than to Tamil (Dra), Santali (AA) or Zeme (S-T). While it is rare for people to speak languages belonging to all four families, I know at least three people who can passably speak six languages from two or three families.
How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?
Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”
I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)
Found the Malaysian
Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.
That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.
To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.
Well most of us speak a mother tongue , and english ( since ex britt colony ) very fluently , but there are times when both parents speak a different language and the city /state you live in has a different language and hence they speak it very close to native fluency !
My bf and his family for instance speaks 6 languages for the reasons listed above !