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Language, Power, and Software 303

One problem is the absence of agreement as to what is required for it to be
said that an individual “speaks X language.” How much fluency? How much
ability to read and write? are required. Linguists offer no consistent answers
to these questions. In a nation like India, where bi-, tri-, and quadrilingual-
ism is common, the primary source for figures on Indian languages is Eth-
nologue. (See below.)
The second problem has to do with the inadequacy of studies of lin-
guistic patterns and usage in South Asia. For example, the most compre-
hensive sources on linguistic patterns in South Asia are found in
<http://www.sil.org/ ethnologue/countries/India.html>. But this document
often relies on out-of-date figures (e.g., 1961 figures for English in India).
Using more current figures, it indicates an extraordinarily low figure of 180
million primary mother-tongue speakers of Hindi (1991) and 346 million
total Hindi speakers including second language users (1994). A recent arti-
cle in the New York Times drawing on the World Almanac and 1990’s figures
puts Hindi speakers at 7.5X% of the world’s population (of approximately six
billion people), which works out to over 400 million. By this reckoning, Hindi
closely follows English and is the third most commonly spoken language in
the world. Other observers believe that Hindi speakers are more numerous
than English speakers. All are agreed that Mandarin Chinese is far and
away the most widely-used language (World Almanac 1999, 700f.).
Furthermore, with regard to languages like Mandarin or Hindi, no
agreement exists on how to categorize dialects that may be mutually unin-
telligible variants of the “same” language or nominally different languages
that are naturally intelligible. In India, some dialects of Hindi are said not
to be mutually intelligible. And in South Asia, Hindi and Urdu derive from
a common origin in spoken Hindustani. Urdu uses Persian script and has
been deliberately “Persianized” by Muslims, and especially by Pakistani au-
thorities, who have made Urdu a national language. (Before Partition vir-
tually no one within the present boundaries of Pakistan spoke Urdu.) Hindi,
in contrast, uses Devanagari script and has been to varying degrees “San-
skritized.” Jawaharlal Nehru, whose native tongue was Hindi, complained
that he could neither read the Indian Constitution in Hindi nor understand
the Hindi broadcasts on Radio India because of the excessive Sanskritiza-
tion of that language. See Wolpert (1996). The continuing congruity between
Urdu and Hindi is shown by the enjoyment of Urdu television by Hindi
speakers in northern India, and vice versa, and even more tellingly by the
February, 1998 visit of Prime Minister Vajpajee of India to Pakistan. He ad-
dressed an Urdu-speaking Pakistani audience in Hindi, and, according to
reports, was perfectly understood by the audience because of continuing
similarities between Hindi and Urdu.
Similar imprecision exists with regard to the percentage of Indians
who “speak English.” The figure of 5% (approximately fifty million) is com-
monly accepted. But one commentator recently argued that only 2% “re-
ally” speak good English, while others have claimed that the percentage is
as high as 10%. And for the purposes of computation, no one (to my knowl-