Saim wrote:I've had Indian teachers on iTalki correct my pronunciation of singular यह and वह. In theory conflating यह with ये is nonstandard in Hindi but it is part of the prestige dialect so almost everyone talks like this in normal speech.
Yeah, I think this is a distinction in Hindi that's artificially introduced to a) distance it from Urdu and b) make it look like Sanskrit, which really does distinguish pronouns by gender and number.
This btw is exactly the sort of reason why I specifically mentioned teachers. Indian teachers say all kinds of BS no one else in the world says.

I'm not sure I've ever even heard anyone say "yah" and such, even with high(ish)-caste, BJP-loving native speakers of Hindi in my family.
n8an wrote:This explains a lot! I have several friends from Mumbai who only speak Hindi and can't speak Marathi, and they told me that their friends don't speak it either. I assumed that this was because they were Catholics, but I guess it's more common than I thought.
Mumbai has been an important port city for centuries by now, so its population is largely made up of immigrants (and their descendants, of course) from various parts of India. The lingua franca of Mumbai is Hindi, not Marathi, especially since an awful lot of these immigrants came (and still come IIUC) from Hindi-speaking areas anyway. I remember my dad once saying there is no way you can go to Mumbai without knowing at least a little bit of Hindi and cab drivers don't speak a word of English. There is even a political party called Shiv Sena that started out criticizing precisely the fact that Mumbai is Hindi-speaking rather than Marathi-speaking and blaming immigrants for this (but ended up becoming a more generically Hindu nationalist movement within a few years).
Are other dialects of Hindi (Awadhi etc) still as commonly spoken, or are they also being eroded by the "standard" version? I know Bhojpuri still has a fair amount of media, but I'm not sure about the rest.
None of the languages spoken in the Hindi Belt have any official recognition except Maithili and Santali (plus languages that are spoken mainly outside the Hindi Belt such as Bengali and English

), so I think everything is being eroded by the standard, even though many of them are among the most widely spoken languages in the world, some of them have long literary histories, and some were even the prestige variety of Hindi until relatively recently and are still widely recognized as being more overtly prestigious than the standard at least in the context of literature. Some very well-known Bollywood songs are in nonstandard varieties, e.g.
this I believe is in Braj, and this is in Awadhi. Much of the dialogue in
Lagaan is in Bhojpuri. Certain kinds of Hindu mythological plays are supposed to use what would now be considered nonstandard varieties by longstanding tradition.
No no. Don't be modest. You just need Hebrew in order to be part of every conversation I can have on this site (along with the 400 I can't partake in)
Well, if you didn't know, I'm currently part of the
Biblical Hebrew and
Modern Hebrew study group.

Ah, so it really is "yeh" and "vo" for both singular and plural in both Hindi and Urdu?
Yep.
I guess all the other languages I've studied in between have made my brain more open to finding logic in places I couldn't see it before.
This is exactly why I study as many languages as I do.