this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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If 100 % of Indians start using English as their lingua franca (they're on a track to just that), does that make Hindi a dialect of English?
The sociopolitical reality of a lingua franca does not define the scientific linguistic reality of other languages.
I will say that personally the notion of catalan being a subset of castellan sounds ridiculous on account of the fact that in its written form catalan is roughly mutually intelligible with french, where castellan is not. If it's going to be lumped in as a dialect of something, it'd be more intellectually honest to make it a dialect of French.
That's not what I've said. Also, there are a lot more languages spoken in India than just Hindi and English is only used by a relatively small elite afaik