India Four - Text
Recorded April 3, 2001 by Nancy Wilcox, edited the same day by Paul Meier. Running time: 00:05:41.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Anybody will, if they look through the history, will find that India has 16 major languages. There’s… Those are nat…uh… nationally recognized languages. They have their own, their have… they have…, each one has its own grammar. Each one has its own…, own accent and phonetics, everything is totally different from the other language. So if I go from Rajasthan to let’s say the Southern part of India, I won’t be able to understand the language in the other state. So there are 25 states and nearly all of them have a… have a… have a language of their own. And not only that, each language has its own dialects, so that, just in case of England, we find that if you go to the northern part of England they, they speak in a different… they speak in a different tone, they-they, they speak in a different…, they have different accent. And a person from Southern England, if it, if he goes to the northern part, he won’t even be able to understand him, the accent there. India, …all its… with all its 16 languages, each one having its own dialects, you can imagine how much difficult it is for a person to understand each language. And… and… So, this is what, I mean the… I mean… Indians, although they didn’t like being ruled by… by the Queen… um… um, for the, for two hundred years, that they ruled us, but the one thing that they did very good to India was they united the country, with all its div-ehm… with all its diversity, and English has now become one unifying language in India. [subject then part of Comma Gets a Cure in an Indian language, not identified].
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY LAURA ARMAN, 13 MARCH, 2008.