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288 Kenneth Keniston

world, ahead of Great Britain and led only by the United States. En-
glish language fiction today is strongly influenced, indeed perhaps
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dominated, by writers of South Asian origin. Indeed, the articulate-
ness of educated South Asians in English is legendary. For the En-
glish-speaking segment of the South Asian population, computing,
almost entirely founded on the English language, presents no prob-
lems whatsoever, nor does computer-mediated communication (e-mail,
Internet, Web) in English.
There are, however, approximately 1.2 billion people in the
Asian subcontinent who do not speak (or more important from the
point of view of computation, read and write) good English. To begin
with, approximately half of the population of the subcontinent is not
literate at all. Equally important, most of the vast literate popula-
tion of the region is literate in some language and script other than
English—or for that matter other than French, German, Spanish,
etc., languages for which localized software is available for all major
operating systems and many important applications.
South Asia contains some of the world’s largest linguistic
groups: for example, Hindi with an estimated four hundred million
speakers (approximately the population of the European Union),
Bengali with approximately two hundred million, and languages
like Telegu with eighty million (about equal to the population of
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Germany.) There are literally dozens of languages with more than
a million speakers in South Asia. India alone recognizes eighteen
official languages. Most of these languages have a unique script,
and most have important literary traditions, both oral and written,
that go back millenia. Some languages are cognate: for example,
Urdu and Hindi both derive from the Hindustani of the Northern
Plains, the one Persianized and the other Sanskritized in accor-
dance with the cultural and political dictates of their respective
speakers and nations.
In India today, major linguistic conflicts are largely absent. The
initial plan to impose Hindi as the national link language has been
repeatedly abandoned in the face of resistance from non-Hindi-
speaking Indians, especially in the Southern states. The Indian
states have been organized along linguistic lines, while English is
accepted as the lingua franca of the national legislature, the higher
civil service, the higher (national) courts, most highly educated peo-
4
ple, and most national and multi-national businesses. But in Pak-
istan linguistic issues were central in the split between East and
West Pakistan (what is now Bangladesh), and conflict over the role
of Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, and other languages continues in today’s