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Languages of India

The cast of the Sanskrit play, "The Cleverness of the Thief." Patricia Sauthoff is in the center, wearing white.

Sanskrit is alive and well, but I prefer treating it as dead

Culture

There are plenty of people learning Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, and those numbers are growing. But those students typically learn the language to read old books, and it turns out trying to use it as a spoken language is a challenge.

Indian street sign in four languages: Hindi, English, Punjabi and Urdu.

India’s new leader favors the Hindi language, which is a problem for the country’s 50 million Urdu speakers

Culture
I tried to buy a Hindi book in Lucknow, but they're not that easy to find. Most of the books for sale seem to be English titles.

When I went home to India, I tried to speak Hindi but everyone wanted to speak English

Global Politics
I tried to buy a Hindi book in Lucknow, but they're not that easy to find. Most of the books for sale seem to be English titles.

When I went home to India, I tried to speak Hindi but everyone wanted to speak English

Global Politics
Images from the Tumblr, “This Could Have Been Frozen”

No room for African or Indian languages in Disney’s multilingual version of ‘Let It Go’

Arts, Culture & Media
Dancers relax after performing during a Diwali Festival in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley gets linguistic enlightenment from India

Arts, Culture & Media

The language of tech start-ups, innovation and business deals are deeply influenced by the many Indians who live and work in Silicon Valley.

New York’s Bengali voters don’t get as much language support as they should

Global Politics

In Tuesday’s elections, in New York City, Bengali voters were supposed to get ballots in their old language. That didn’t happen, and advocates for immigrants say that’s not fair.

Linguists hope to save endangered languages in India

UNESCO lists nearly 200 of India’s 900 languages as endangered. Others are dying fast as the county continues its rapid development. A team of researchers are working to catalog what’s left of them before they disappear completely.

Pakistani scholars concerned that Urdu script being lost to technology

In SMS-happy Pakistani, many young people are writing their text messages in using the Latin alphabet, rather than the traditional Urdu script. That has some concerned that the classical script will disappear.

Pakistan set to require telecom companies to block messages from a bizarre word list

In Pakistan, supposedly in an effort to combat the sending of spam text messages, the country has introduced a list of 1,500 words that will trigger a text message to be blocked.