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To Google: Tamil, etc aren’t “Indic languages”

By Pranav Chavda ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

My apologies for the off-topic post, however, since the official google blog hasn’t a commenting feature, posting this here so that I can leave a trackback. Google announced a couple days ago the launch of what they call “Indic” language support – with transliteration facilities for english to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil.

In response to google’s post titled Building the Indic Web : The latter three languages are actually Dravidian languages, you can’t term them Indic! “Indic” refers to Indian languages of the Indo-European/Indo-Aryan family – The ones that use the Dev Nagri script or it’s derivatives. South Indian languages are a completely different family of languages. The term “Indic” refers to Sanskrit and it’s Prakrits, such as Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi (Funny how all prakrits end with an “i” as the last letter of the name of the language). This, obviously, does not include the four south-Indian languages – i.e Tamil, Kannada, Malyalam and Telugu. The only place to the south of India to use an Indic Language is Sri-Lanka with it’s non-tamil population speaking sinhalese which is very similar to Dev-Nagri.

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Discussion

Comments for “To Google: Tamil, etc aren’t “Indic languages””

  • Proud Indian From South
    For us, the people from south, Hindi itself is not a Indian language. We consider Sanskrit as Indian language spoken by people north of vindhya.

    First understand that Hindi is a regional language of UP, Bihar and MP which replaced one of the sacred language of india. Sanskrit in those regions.
    Come little outside these states, you will not find hindi. Dont drag the prakrits to support you. Understand that your hindi speaking people are also minorities. Those people speaking marathi, gujarati, bengali and punjabi have to be blamed for not being proud about their language.

    Our Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada is older than your hindi boss ! and more phonetic than your hindi.

    Dont impose regionalism on us.

    To unite as nation, we need in unity in diversity. India doesnt need one language to unite the country. It will be united by all the language.

    India doesnt need the talk of which language is superior, which language is indic kind of arguments. So please remove this post or get a life.
  • I din't say south Indian languages are not Indian. How absurd!

    All I am saying is that these are not indic, meaning that these are
    ancient languages but aren't branches or sub-branches of sanskrit and
    it's prakrits or other indo-european languages. I know that tamil is THE
    oldest language of India, but that doesn't make it Indic - mainly
    because it's not sanskrit, nor is it derived from sanskrit or written in
    a way that sanskrit is.

    For the record, I am neither a speaker of Hindi nor of south Indian
    languages. It's just the way google has classified these languages is
    incorrect and I was pointing that out.
  • anonymous
    nice view on the origins of the aryan race:
    http://www.think-israel.org/girishkumar.aryanra...
  • I wouldn't say it's a "race", more like a linguistic group. There isn't such a thing as an aryan race.
  • Dont drag the prakrits to support you. Understand that your hindi speaking people are also minorities. Those people speaking marathi, gujarati, bengali and punjabi have to be blamed for not being proud about their language.
  • You're right. most of us non-hindi+non-south Indian people just don't take our own languages seriously enough.

    btw, I don't get why commenter are pointing out to me things about "your hindi". Hindi isn't mine. I'm a right wing Gujarati
    Mumbaikar (meaning I don't really like the hindi language so much) who also speaks marathi, hindi and english. This post was not about Hindi. but about prakrits and sanskrit and non-indic languages.
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