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What are the mutual intelligibility between the Indian languages? Are they mutually intelligible with each other?
What are the mutual intelligibility between the Chinese languages? Are they mutually intelligible with each other?
Think of these as two separate questions. I know China and India are like two completely different worlds and cannot be compared with each other, but I didn't really want to make two separate threads about this.
What are the mutual intelligibility between the Chinese languages? Are they mutually intelligible with each other?
The short answer is: it depends. The definition of a "language" is not very clear here.
Beijing and Nanjing are largely mutually intelligible (You can check the map), but Nanjing and Shanghai are not.
Nowadays standard Mandarin is required in school so everyone under 60 years old understands it, even if not speaks it fluently.
I should think there wouldn't be a need for English as an official language of government and education and the primary language of commerce if the Indian languages were mutually intelligible.
The main languages in India fall into two groups: Indo-European and Dravidian. The first group includes Hindi, the closest thing to a national lingua franca (along with English) which is actually the native language of the 'Hindi belt' of much of the Gangetic plain (think Delhi, Uttar Pradesh.etc). Gujarati and Marathi are similar and I believe somewhat mutually intelligible. Bengali, also IE, is more distant. The Dravidian languages of southern India like Malayee, Kanada and of course Tamil are a different story. Despite Sanskrit loanwords they are not intelligible with Hindi and use different writing systems.
In China due to government policy Mandarin, Putonghua, which developed among the mandarins of the court in Beijing, is spoken throughout China. I believe all schoolchildren are supposed to learn it. The largest minority languages, sometimes called 'dialects', are Yue (Cantonese) and the Min languages, including Minnan or Hokkien of Guangdong and Fujian provinces. They are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Neither is Wu, the local language of the Shanghai area. The written language, however, is the same, although some words are phonetically different.
There are four main language families in the world, and just from memory, classification is based on common roots/ancestors.
-> indo-european : hindi, gujarati, latin, greek .. pretty much all of north indian / european languages fall here
-> dravidian - spoken in southern india ( tamil, telugu , malayalam etc) .. believe there is a link to the sumerian languages
-> afro-asiatic : hebrew , arabic , turkic etc
- sino-tibetian - This is where chinese languages fall ( if i am not wrong)
So, for example, european/ north indian languages would have similar structure ( grammar ) and words would be similar or have a common root from which it was derived.
This would be one of the reasons why indian and chinese languages differ. because of the fundamental difference in structure.
There are four main language families in the world, and just from memory, classification is based on common roots/ancestors.
-> indo-european : hindi, gujarati, latin, greek .. pretty much all of north indian / european languages fall here
-> dravidian - spoken in southern india ( tamil, telugu , malayalam etc) .. believe there is a link to the sumerian languages
-> afro-asiatic : hebrew , arabic , turkic etc
- sino-tibetian - This is where chinese languages fall ( if i am not wrong)
So, for example, european/ north indian languages would have similar structure ( grammar ) and words would be similar or have a common root from which it was derived.
This would be one of the reasons why indian and chinese languages differ. because of the fundamental difference in structure.
Turkic languages are not Afro-Asiatic. They are Altaic, the same as Mongolian. It is suggested by some scholars that Korean and Japanese are Altaic too.
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