Word: tamil
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...Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri. Under the new law, official business now must be carried out in Hindi, and civil servants, India's largest urban labor force, are granted higher seniority status for learning it. But in southern India, where 111 million people speak four different, Dravidian languages - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam - there is frustrated opposition to the law. Along with suicides, there were riots, bus burnings, and demonstrations. Before they ended, 1,500 people had been arrested...
...dialects; the only truly common language among educated Indians is English. Hindi script is an almost insurmountable obstacle for southern Indians; it is made up of a series of curves, lines, and floating vowels, arranged above a horizontal line, as against the intricate, graceful loops and curves of Tamil. For instance, the words "India and America" are written thus in Hindi...
...follows in Tamil...
Hindi is also different from Tamil in its syntax. The start of St. Luke's parable of the prodigal son ("A certain man had two sons") becomes in Hindi "One man did two sons have," and in Tamil "For one man two sons were." South Indian languages have a neuter gender as well as masculine and feminine; in the north, there are only masculine and feminine. "Water," for example, is neuter in Tamil, feminine in Hindi...
...Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh (Nehru's as well as Prime Minister Shastri's home). The officialization of Hindi has long been fought by non-Hindi regions, chiefly four southern states to which Hindi is as foreign as Tex-Mex; they are Madras (which speaks Tamil), Andhra Pradesh (Telu-gu), Kerala (Malayalam) and Mysore (Kannada). Anti-Hindis accuse the Hindis of being out for political gain. In any case, should Hindi become the exclusive official tongue, thousands of civil servants, who do not understand Hindi but get government clerical jobs through their knowledge of English, would...