[Music] okay so the idea of this first clip is to give you a wide-angle overview of the languages of South Asia now this topic just like just about everything else in this part of the world is complex it's chaotic it's multicolored it's totally overwhelming but it's still really beautiful I think now to start with let's just check out this stat the 2001 census of India lists 122 different major languages in the country of India and 1599 minor languages and dialects and this is just for one country in the region of South Asia now given the staggering amount of linguistic diversity how can we even get started thinking about language well I'd like to start with a very simple question and maybe it's one that you've never really thought about what exactly are languages anyway we all have at least one of them and we all use them pretty effectively maybe some of us use them better than others but I'd say most of us on the whole do alright now even though we all know other languages it's kind of hard to describe this thing called language in abstract terms right well one way to define languages is as naturally developed systems of verbal communication what I mean by that is that we use these bits and bobs that are called words in a systematic way we make sentences out of them based on a distinct set of rules that we already just kind of know as adults if other people happen to know how our code works and what our words mean then they can decipher the message that we've encoded in this sentence this is what constitutes a successful act of linguistic communication this is language now i've bracket out bracketed two ideas in this definition that you might notice one is verbal and the other is naturally developed languages don't have to be based on oral sounds for example their sign language right there's also artificial languages like Esperanto or Klingon but most of the time when linguists study languages they're talking about the ones that are spoken by people and ones that have evolved naturally in human cultures around the world our world not the Klingon home planet okay so now that we know what a language is I want to say two more things that I think are important to talk about first we should keep in mind that language is not necessarily tied to ethnicity anyone can learn any language no matter who you are no matter the color of your skin it's true that the first language you learn is usually the language of your biological parents unless you're adopted right and it's and this first language it's kind of hard coded in your brain as you grow and mature so language is it can be tied to ethnic background in that way but it doesn't mean that it has to be your only language there are plenty of people who learn and adopt new languages that have no relation to their ethnicity and there's adoption too as wheat as I mentioned second languages are not the same as scripts often people get confused about those two things languages are oral for the most part while scripts are written symbols that try to capture oral language many languages can share the same script there's Roman script that's used for like English French German and so on in India modern Hindi Marathi Sanskrit are all written in Devanagari script but the written form is all um was always a simulacra of the spoken language it's an imitation of these oral sounds also language can be written in any script so Sanskrit is usually written in Devanagari but it can also be written in Roman script or tie or Sinhalese or nepali or thummell or Burmese or Chinese even or even in the perso-arabic script it was written that way in the Mughal period okay so now with all that out of the way once we move to looking at the hundreds of languages of South Asia the first thing that we'll notice is that they can be divided into four distinct language families a language family is actually not really much different than your family or my family or any other family it's a set of sister languages that are genetically related to one another by this I mean that they haven't they've naturally evolved from a same parent language a mother language let's say in South Asia there's four of these families and by the way notice that today I'm calling everything South Asia and not India this is because languages don't know political boundaries and a lot of these languages are found today in modern Pakistan Bangladesh and not just the country of India so when we're talking about the present day we should be careful not to just say India but South Asia anyway back to our foreign language families they're called indo-aryan Dravidian more naughty or austro-asiatic and tibeto-burman they're all fascinating and we'll look at each of them one by one but before we do I want to again emphasize that they're not necessarily connected to ethnicity there aren't biological differences between the speakers of the four language families although we can discern cultural differences sometimes between say North Indians and South Indians but biologically there's always been plenty of inter mixture between the speakers of these languages these are languages not races okay so let's start looking at each one of the language families one by one starting with the biggest which is called endo argan here again I want to emphasize that we shouldn't take Arion to denote that race it did get used that way by Europeans especially in the nineteenth century and it's kind of an unfortunate residue of all of those colonial ways of thinking but when linguists talk when linguists use the word endo arjen it's really just an artificial label we could just as easily substitute it with another word like some script ik maybe and maybe actually that might be a better word to use but anyhow indo-aryan is the word that linguists use now and those are the languages primarily found in northern India or Pakistan Nepal Bangladesh and you'll notice that there's one outlier all the way down south in sri lanka called stein holla that one seems to have gotten down there when a group of with this migrated down from eastern india eastern coast of india about two thousand years ago the major modern languages belonging to this family are Hindi Urdu which is one of the two national languages of India and has over four hundred and seventy three million speakers in India others include a Bengali Meraki Gujarati Punjabi which is Punjabi of course feels like the Indian national language here in Vancouver since there's so many Punjabi speakers and many many of the folks in our class as well I'm sure but while there are 29 million Punjabi speakers in India which is almost the same as the population of Canada it's only the fifth largest language group in India anyhow all the indo-aryan languages came from the classical language of Sanskrit just like how all the romance languages of Europe like French Italian Spanish and so on all have descended from Latin the one twist in South Asia is that the indo-aryan languages also have what are called aerial influences of Persian Arabic and English that have altered the vocabulary sets so that's why you got a language like voodoo which almost feels like Persian in its vocabulary but the core of these languages even who do comes from Sanskrit the grammar still comes from sense the second major language family in South Asia is called the Dravidian family these are mostly spoken in southern India with anything there's also an outlier in the Umbraco II that you see all the way in the upper left corner of the map this is a language spoken by kind of herdsmen heard hurting communities in Balochistan all the way in Pakistan and it's actually kind of in the area of those old Indus Valley sites so you can imagine what the speculation was this is a survival of that very old Indus Valley culture many thousands of years later maybe who knows maybe so either way it's kind of fascinating to figure out why it's there anyway these all descended from a single common ancestor that we call proto Dravidian sometimes people call it old thummell all four of the big Dravidian languages I should note have developed really rich literary traditions in their own languages and they produce some really unbelievable ancient poetry dance drama I highly encourage you to check it out if you get the chance now turning quickly to the third the moon daddy family this is a set of languages of tribal communities and if rural communities that are located in the jungles of central and eastern India spoken by relatively small populations they're all unwritten and have been passed down orally for thousands of years nowadays though because of modernization and stand and the standardized Indian national education system manymoon body languages are threatened with extinction as younger speakers choose English or Hindi instead it's a bit like indigenous languages in Canada a few of these mati languages have already gone extinct perhaps the current Indian government actually is far less sympathetic to their vulnerability than we are here in Canada all of them when dottie languages also would have come from a single common ancestor which you could call proto moon daddy there's a fascinating theory actually an alternate theory that wrote Oh moon daddy was the original language of the Indus Valley and not proto Dravidian as other people think finally I just want to mention a fourth length language family that usually is totally neglected when talking about languages in South Asia even your readings actually if ignored them and these are the tibeto-burman languages as you can see from the map this family has a very diverse tree there's many little tiny isolated subgroups within the indigenous communities in the mountainous areas of Nepal northeastern India Burma of course Myanmar but they've also spread all across into Southeast Asia as well the major language of this group is Tibetan but also a awadhi in Nepal is quite prominent and in India money booty and bodo account for the largest speakers of these languages so there you have it the four big language families of South Asia in our next segment we're gonna take a closer look at what historical linguists have discovered about the biggest one of these the indo-european language family so see you in a minute [Music] you