Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Cormetz t1_j8n4vtk wrote

Reply to comment by VintageJane in India, soon world's most populous nation, doesn't know how many people it has by Icewear_Daddy

One Problem with your example is Arabic not spoken as a primary language in India at all. The Muslim population speaks the local languages of their area but might speak Arabic for religious reasons at times.

−1

VintageJane t1_j8oxrxv wrote

My example wasn’t for India. I went for Arabic as a language in my example that has nothing more than some words in common with English (the “technical” language being spoken in Louisiana Creole) as opposed to being a root language (German or Latin) or language with shared root (French or Italian).

The point being that in India, the government official may speak two of the common languages of the country (one natively and the other regional language functionally) and if the person they are attempting to communicate with is speaking a weird bastardized version of the latter language (sorry Louisianans) which has very little in common with the language you speak fluently then it can be very difficult to decipher.

5