Ask Lemmy

Native English speaker, but I've visited India, so I have a different, related topic. Of course, there's two caveats: I have an outsider's perspective and the British have a very lengthy history with the region. In major cities, spoken English seems as popular as Hindi. In Delhi, signs seemed to be entirely in English, although maybe I just didn't notice the Devanagari script as much because it's incredibly foreign to me. Kolkata had less spoken English, but still more English signs than Hindi or Bengal (I can't tell the difference). Traveling to rural West Bengal, the advertisements have skewed towards Bengali (I believe) and road signs are dual language, but but I don't think I've seen a single business sign that didn't have English as the primary text.

I thought it was silly that English and Chinese became the main languages in Firefly (which, for the show, was English with Chinese words thrown in). Now I realize, not only is that possible, but it's already here. English is the global standard for air traffic control and imperialism has pushed language influence far and wide. International business has made English effectively a requirement for competitiveness. I was just oblivious as an English-only speaker at the time. I've wondered if Hindi would now be a more accurate 2nd language for the Firefly future, but I'm not convinced because of how prevalent English is there, like it might have already reduced the power of Hindi on the global scale. Plus, there's so many dialects there, Hindi is the most common but it doesn't have a majority