Are OTL Maps allowed here? This is my attempt at a mapping of the languages which use Devanagari script;
Here’s a real world map. Upset and tired of some maps being insanely complicated/difficult to read, others having serious political agendas, and still more simply giving up trying to show complexities and just sticking to state borders, I’ve tried to a make a map of the languages that use the Devanagari alphabet. If anyone can give me feedback, that’d be great!
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy”, is a phrase commonly attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich. I once heard- and now I can’t find the original source of- another linguist who replied something along the lines of ‘Well, that may be true for Europe. But in South Asia a language is a dialect with its own library and alphabet.’ This is true for the areas around the rim of South Asia- Eastern, Southern, and even Western India, as well as Pre-Islamic Pakistan and Afghanistan.
However, in the central north, on the vast Gangetic plain, home to more people than the United States, a single alphabet predominates. Muslims may of course use Nastaliq, but across the teeming cities, fertile river farmlands, mountains tall, deserts wide, and jungles dense a single alphabet is widely used. ‘
Devanagari’ – pronounced something like [d̪eːʋˈnaːɡri], meaning ‘of the Place of the Gods’, is one of the most great world alphabets, or in this case the greatest of the ‘alpha-syllabaries.’ With a history going back roughly a thousand years as the common system of writing amongst Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist North Indians, and as the standard for writing the revered classical language- Sanskrit (though the invention of Devanagari long postdates the end of spoken Sanskrit)- Devanagari has replaced numerous other smaller scripts.
The center of the Devanagari-using area remains North India. North India is, as formerly Roman Europe was a thousand years ago, a classic example of a Dialect continuum. A can understand B as if they spoke the same language, and be B can to C, and so on until F. But A and F are totally unable to have a conversation. Such is lack of easily discernable borders across the ‘Hindi’ Belt. Speakers of Rajasthani and Bhojpuri for instance, may both describe their language as Hindi, but are very different. A standardized Hindi, promoted by the government of India and based on the speech of Delhi but with renewed emphasis on deriving technical words from Sanskrit rather than Persian, exists almost as a separate language widely used across the Hindi Belt. Increasingly, young people, urban dwellers, and the Middle class may speak this standard Hindi natively, even in places like Mumbai and Bangalore (which are both far to the South of the Hindi Belt). The language of Delhi itself is quite closer to Punjabi or Urdu than either of those- yet Punjabi and Urdu later two are considered separate languages on account of their scripts and the religions associated with them (Sikhism and Islam respectively).
Historically, the ‘Khari Boli’ (a term roughly equivalent to the European ‘Lingua Franca’) of North India was Braj (the language of Agra) from roughly 1000 A.D. to 1500 A.D., and Avadhi (the language of Lucknow- also spelled ‘Awadhi’ or even ‘Oudhi’) from roughly 1500 A.D. to 1800 A.D. The Mughal, British, and Indian Republican governments however all promoted Dehlavi (the language of Delhi) as the Khari Boli, and in the 1800s it bore fruit as the standard versions of both Modern Hindi and Urdu (which subsequently became the common tongue for Pakistan). All totaled, speakers in the Hindi Belt likely come close to half a billion people.
The second largest language to use the Devanagari Alphabet is Marathi, the language of the state of Maharashtra, including the city of Mumbai. It too has some level of a dialect continuum between the North-East and South-West, the prestige city here is Pune, but not nearly to the extent of the much larger Hindi Belt. Marathi has had less influence from Persian, Turkic Languages, and Arabic than Hindi, but it has more than made up for it in heavy Dravidian (South Indian) influence. Still, plenty of Marathi speakers maintain that their language is closer to Sanskrit than Hindi.
Nepali, though close to some of the languages which are often considered mere ‘dialects’ of Hindi, is the national language of Nepal. Other languages of Nepal use the Devanagari script as well, even Sino-Tibetan ones like Newari, which was once the kingdom’s national language.
In Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmiri (the language of Srinagar) and Dogri (the language of Jammu) also use the Devanagari script. They may be spoken to an extent in Pakistan, but there all languages are written in the Persian variant of the Arabic alphabet, and so are not included in this map.
Konkani, the language of Goa, is unique amongst Indian languages in its large vocabulary from a European Language. Portuguese rule over Goa was much more direct and forceful than British rule over the rest of India (which required the help local elites and constant compromise), and Konkani culture has been altered by a wider margin (though two thirds of Goa remains Hindu). Even now, as other Indian languages bring in words like ‘Computer’, ‘Wash-Basin’, ‘Flat’, or ‘Highway’ from British English, Konkani brings in their equivalents from Portuguese. Though it should be pointed out that even other parts of India have taken from the Portuguese- the Hindi word for key ‘Chaabee’ comes from Portuguese.
Several other languages with very widely divergent origins- Mundari, Bheeli, Khandeshi, Bodo, to name a few, are regarded as ‘Tribal’ or ‘Adivasi’ languages. Though considered backwater, low-development village types, they often still have rich oral language heritage. Even little Khandeshi (also called Ahirani) has more speakers than Estonian and slightly-larger Bodo has more than Lithuanian.
All throughout this area English continues to spread, though unlike other parts of the words there is comparatively less of a threat of language loss due to English. In my opinion, official statistics saying that roughly a fifth of Indians can speak English are hugely over-inflated, by many Indians themselves for whom lack of knowledge of English is an embarrassment. Instead, Standard Hindi and Standard Marathi continue to grow within in India, and Nepali continues to do so within Nepal. Preservationists have already turned against Hindi, now that it is clearly the predator in the Linguistics ecosystem of India. The Indian Government debates making a Hindi a World Language at the UN (it would be the 7th language to hold that distinction), but at home Hindi still remains a ‘co-official’ language with English. Agitations both in favor of and against making Hindi a so-called ‘national language’ remain deadlocked across the country.
The Devanagari script remains in all likelihood the fourth most commonly used script in the world, remaining ahead of Cyrillic in total number of people by large margin.
