>Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all.
Basically the situation leads to people being forced to learn English, and being forced to accept an English centric world. I don't see that to be fair.
Indian languages can be represented in ASCII, the ISCII encoding does exactly that. The problem is in rendering the conjunct consonants. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/index. html
>Those who use the conventional method of standing on queue, pay with cash. Those who use the internet, pay with credit cards I suppose.
Definitely, this is a factor in the digital divide. But please realise that 1) It's also possible to pay thru credit cards if you are standing in a queue. Also, many websites in India do offer cash on delivery options.
>I think you are underestimating people's ability to understand timetables and the names of their origin and destination cities,
I am not underestimating that. I'm just talking about easy of use, and therefore popularity of the medium. Given a choice, would you visit a Korean site to book a ticket to Korea or an English site? [I'm assuming you don't know Korean.] Please don't forget that English and Indian languages use *different scripts*.
>>Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500. >This is partly because the majority of Hindi-speakers are illiterate.
Yes, partly. Remember that Hindi newspapers have higher circulation then English newspapers in India. And if you keep in mind that Hindi is just one of the many languages, the share of English newspapers goes even lower.
Therefore the low number of websites in Hindi is only _partly_ because of illiteracy. Otherewise the same would have reflected in the newspaper medium also.
Now if you say it's because of lack of computer literacy, well, we go into egg and chicken circle...:)
I never said they would know Hindi. I just said they would be more comfortable in their local language, which in this case would be Bengali.
>7 years ago, it was 4%. I beleive it's significantly higher now,
How much higher? Even if you take 8% as the figure, we still have too many literates around who don't know English. Again, I'm not saying Hindi should replace English, the _local_language_ , whatever it is, should.
>That 2% figure does seem pretty suspicious -- are you sure that it doesn't represent the number of fluent English speakers?
Ok, guys! It's 4% and not 2%. Does it make a difference? They failed to replace English with a local language in the government, because the government was formed of the elite.
But don't forget: 1. The most popular TV news channel in India is not in English. 2. There are more Indian language movies watched and made in India than in English. 3. The newspapers with the highest circulations in India are not English newspapers.
I just posted a correction, seems to be closer to 4%. 40 million people speak English. 65% literacy rate. The links are there in another message in this thread. That makes it 650 million literates. Assuming all the 40 million who speak English ar also literate, it still leaves 610 million literates who don't speak English.
Even considering that these 40 mill knew English very well, would they be more comfortable using English or their own their mother tongue while working on a computer?
English in India -- and Who Speaks English to Whom and When? Annika Hohenthal, Department of English, University of Turku, Finland In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal 1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).
Those are 1995 statistics, so you might add a few million to the 35 mil. mentioned above. 4% of 1 billion still leaves 960 million in the lurch.
The literacy rate of India is http://www.cyberjournalist.org.in/census/cenli t0.h tml (takes time to load) 65.38%. (2001 census statistics)
This means, 60% of the population, ie 600 million literate people in India are denied the use of computers and internet services(note that I distinguish between programmers and the users of the programmers because they don't know English.
These are the figures. These 600 mill are the ones I'm drawing attention to.
You touched the heart of the problem. The reason why there's so little Indian language computing is the lack of a standard. The Koreans made it mandatory for vendors to support their NL charset. Whereas in India, the government never made that condition mandatory. So now, there are just too many (non)standard charsets floating around, and considering the situation now I think UTF-8 is the best bet, even though it takes up >1 byte. ISCII was the standard developed by a govt research organisation for Indian languages, but it was never properly enforced. Also the organisation never brought out the ISCII editors in public domain. That killed Indian language computing.
Most Indians who visit London may know English; That doesn't mean that the Indians who don't visit London are illiterate. Nor does it mean that a person not knowing English should be considered to be illiterate. The PC in my home can just not be used by my grandparents because they don't know English. And my grandfather completed college at the age of 17, started teaching in the same college next year. He didn't learn or teach English - he taught Sanskrit.
Concluding that 98% of Indians are illiterate, is a little off the mark.
When software can be developed for use in Icelandic, Korean, Greek - all these languages have less sepeakers than most Indian languages, why not in Indian languages? Multiplicity of languages is not the issue, you develop the content or software in the language you use.
You go English because the tools are already there, not because you're scared of alienating the other languages.
Let me give an example: In order to get a railway reservation in India, you have to go to the Booking office, stand in a line, wait for your turn(could take anywhere from 30 to 120 min), and get your ticket. Yes, the ticket system is networked nationwide, you can buy a ticket from A to B from any booking office, that may be located in C.
Recently the government(owns the Railways in India, and it happens to be the world's 4th largest network) started online railway ticket booking. The people who book online, have an advantage of 30 to 120 minutes over the ones who don't - they don't need to stand in the line and wait, while someone ahead of them can book on the same train and deny them a ticket.
The trouble is, the website's interface is in English; whereas in the booking office, the forms can be filled in the local language - they're bilingual.
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Now, if the same interface was also there in the local languages, wouldn't people be eager to use it? You don't need to buy a computer to access the web, cyber cafe charges are ~40c an hour, so on spending 15 minutes in the cybercafe, you would spend the same amount as for when you go to the booking office.
So, a supply side pressure, as you rightly put it, may not always increase demand, but it's things like these...
English is understood by "most" Indians who frequent slashdot. But there are *at least* 15 languages in India(_not_dialects_) whose speakers exceed English speakers in India. To name a few: Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam Telugu , Bengali, Marathi, etc.
Most Indians - (not most Indians in the US, not most Indians on slashdot, not most Indian programmers) - most Indians don't know English.
There appear to be so many Indian programmers because despite being a miniscule percentage, 2% of 1 billion is still a huge number.
Not having software applications in the local languages is only going to increase the digital divide in India.
China's population is higher than India, and the Chinese use Chinese for computing.
In order of number of speakers of languages, the highest is Chinese, followed by English, and next comes Hindi.
Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500. And Chinese? More than 10,000 and growing.
Now, please don't conclude that this is because the Chinese don't understand English and Indians do. That's specious reasoning.
The Indians who don't know English are denied a lot, that includes computing tools.
What the government needs to make those college students do is develop applications in the local languages. Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.
OTOH 900 million people *worldwide* (not just in India) understand Hindi. However there are very few applications and operating systems that do support Indic scripts. http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/ , http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/ , and http://www.geocities.com/hanu_man_ji are some efforts in this direction. Instead of making them dream about making dough in the US, the Indian college students and programmers should be encouraged if not forced to develop tools, utilities and applications in the Indian languages. Not only will it boost the demand for PC's - many Indian homes have white goods in the range of $400 or so, but no PC's - who'll use them if you don't know English? - it will give a big boost to the quality of programming; there are many smart people in India but they are limited by a lack of knowledge of English.
Slashdot Mirror
>Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all.
. html
Basically the situation leads to people being forced to learn English, and being forced to accept an English centric world. I don't see that to be fair.
Indian languages can be represented in ASCII, the ISCII encoding does exactly that. The problem is in rendering the conjunct consonants. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/index
>I think your numbers about Hindi speaking is way overinflated.
The 900m number for Hindi speakers was the worldwide figure, not just in India. Within India, yes, the number would be lesser.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, but I did mention 900 speakers worldwide in my post, not just in India.
>Those who use the conventional method of standing on queue, pay with cash. Those who use the internet, pay with credit cards I suppose.
Definitely, this is a factor in the digital divide. But please realise that 1) It's also possible to pay thru credit cards if you are standing in a queue. Also, many websites in India do offer cash on delivery options.
>I think you are underestimating people's ability to understand timetables and the names of their origin and destination cities,
I am not underestimating that. I'm just talking about easy of use, and therefore popularity of the medium. Given a choice, would you visit a Korean site to book a ticket to Korea or an English site? [I'm assuming you don't know Korean.] Please don't forget that English and Indian languages use *different scripts*.
>>Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.
... :)
>This is partly because the majority of Hindi-speakers are illiterate.
Yes, partly. Remember that Hindi newspapers have higher circulation then English newspapers in India. And if you keep in mind that Hindi is just one of the many languages, the share of English newspapers goes even lower.
Therefore the low number of websites in Hindi is only _partly_ because of illiteracy. Otherewise the same would have reflected in the newspaper medium also.
Now if you say it's because of lack of computer literacy, well, we go into egg and chicken circle
>They might not know Hindi as well.
I never said they would know Hindi.
I just said they would be more comfortable in their local language, which in this case would be Bengali.
>7 years ago, it was 4%. I beleive it's significantly higher now,
How much higher? Even if you take 8% as the figure, we still have too many literates around who don't know English.
Again, I'm not saying Hindi should replace English, the _local_language_ , whatever it is, should.
>That 2% figure does seem pretty suspicious -- are you sure that it doesn't represent the number of fluent English speakers?
Ok, guys! It's 4% and not 2%.
Does it make a difference?
They failed to replace English with a local language in the government, because the government was formed of the elite.
But don't forget:
1. The most popular TV news channel in India is not in English.
2. There are more Indian language movies watched and made in India than in English.
3. The newspapers with the highest circulations in India are not English newspapers.
So you can see what is popular with the _people_.
I just posted a correction, seems to be closer to 4%.
40 million people speak English.
65% literacy rate.
The links are there in another message in this thread.
That makes it 650 million literates.
Assuming all the 40 million who speak English ar also literate, it still leaves 610 million literates who don't speak English.
Even considering that these 40 mill knew English very well, would they be more comfortable using English or their own their mother tongue while working on a computer?
I'm sorry if I misunderstood you.
l /5 .2.html
i t0.h tml
The percentage of English speaking Indians is not 2%. But quite close.
http://www.victorianweb.org/post/india/hohentha
English in India -- and Who Speaks English to Whom and When?
Annika Hohenthal, Department of English, University of Turku, Finland
In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal 1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).
Those are 1995 statistics, so you might add a few million to the 35 mil. mentioned above.
4% of 1 billion still leaves 960 million in the lurch.
The literacy rate of India is
http://www.cyberjournalist.org.in/census/cenl
(takes time to load)
65.38%. (2001 census statistics)
This means,
60% of the population, ie 600 million literate people in India are denied the use of computers and internet services(note that I distinguish between programmers and the users of the programmers because they don't know English.
These are the figures.
These 600 mill are the ones I'm drawing attention to.
You touched the heart of the problem. The reason why there's so little Indian language computing is the lack of a standard. The Koreans made it mandatory for vendors to support their NL charset. Whereas in India, the government never made that condition mandatory.
So now, there are just too many (non)standard charsets floating around, and considering the situation now I think UTF-8 is the best bet, even though it takes up >1 byte.
ISCII was the standard developed by a govt research organisation for Indian languages, but it was never properly enforced. Also the organisation never brought out the ISCII editors in public domain. That killed Indian language computing.
With UTF-8, let's hope something emerges...
Most Indians who visit London may know English; That doesn't mean that the Indians who don't visit London are illiterate. Nor does it mean that a person not knowing English should be considered to be illiterate. The PC in my home can just not be used by my grandparents because they don't know English. And my grandfather completed college at the age of 17, started teaching in the same college next year. He didn't learn or teach English - he taught Sanskrit.
Concluding that 98% of Indians are illiterate, is a little off the mark.
When software can be developed for use in Icelandic, Korean, Greek - all these languages have less sepeakers than most Indian languages, why not in Indian languages? Multiplicity of languages is not the issue, you develop the content or software in the language you use.
You go English because the tools are already there, not because you're scared of alienating the other languages.
Let me give an example:
...
In order to get a railway reservation in India, you have to go to the Booking office, stand in a line, wait for your turn(could take anywhere from 30 to 120 min), and get your ticket. Yes, the ticket system is networked nationwide, you can buy a ticket from A to B from any booking office, that may be located in C.
Recently the government(owns the Railways in India, and it happens to be the world's 4th largest network) started online railway ticket booking.
The people who book online, have an advantage of 30 to 120 minutes over the ones who don't - they don't need to stand in the line and wait, while someone ahead of them can book on the same train and deny them a ticket.
The trouble is, the website's interface is in English; whereas in the booking office, the forms can be filled in the local language - they're bilingual.
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Now, if the same interface was also there in the local languages, wouldn't people be eager to use it? You don't need to buy a computer to access the web, cyber cafe charges are ~40c an hour, so on spending 15 minutes in the cybercafe, you would spend the same amount as for when you go to the booking office.
So, a supply side pressure, as you rightly put it, may not always increase demand, but it's things like these
:) autoritarian, do you think? ...
Well POSIX.1 was "forced" by the American government, and it did more good than harm
The Indix project is by NCST. Link in my OP.
Do you have any links to the Mandrake 9.x support for indian languages?
English is understood by "most" Indians who frequent slashdot.u ,
But there are *at least* 15 languages in India(_not_dialects_) whose speakers exceed English speakers in India.
To name a few:
Hindi,
Tamil,
Gujarati,
Malayalam
Telug
Bengali,
Marathi,
etc.
Most Indians - (not most Indians in the US, not most Indians on slashdot, not most Indian programmers) - most Indians don't know English.
There appear to be so many Indian programmers because despite being a miniscule percentage, 2% of 1 billion is still a huge number.
Not having software applications in the local languages is only going to increase the digital divide in India.
China's population is higher than India, and the Chinese use Chinese for computing.
In order of number of speakers of languages, the highest is Chinese, followed by English, and next comes Hindi.
Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.
And Chinese? More than 10,000 and growing.
Now, please don't conclude that this is because the Chinese don't understand English and Indians do. That's specious reasoning.
The Indians who don't know English are denied a lot, that includes computing tools.
What the government needs to make those college students do is develop applications in the local languages. Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.
OTOH 900 million people *worldwide* (not just in India) understand Hindi. However there are very few applications and operating systems that do support Indic scripts.
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/ , http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/ , and http://www.geocities.com/hanu_man_ji are some efforts in this direction.
Instead of making them dream about making dough in the US, the Indian college students and programmers should be encouraged if not forced to develop tools, utilities and applications in the Indian languages. Not only will it boost the demand for PC's - many Indian homes have white goods in the range of $400 or so, but no PC's - who'll use them if you don't know English? - it will give a big boost to the quality of programming; there are many smart people in India but they are limited by a lack of knowledge of English.