Cultural Diversity - The Civil Service

Land Registry Cultural DiversityHindi is the most widely understood Indic language in Britain as well as in thesubcontinent, partly because of its official status but also because it is the commonlanguage of “Bollywood” – the extremely successful Indian film and musical industry.UrduUrdu is the mother tongue of around 5 million Pakistanis and 30 million Indians. Inaddition, some 60 million people speak it as a second language, largely because of itsassociation with the Muslim faith. It is also the official language of Pakistan, and ofsome regions in India.As a spoken language it is almost identical to Hindi, having a common source in theold Hindustani dialect, the obvious distinction being that it uses a different script – thePerso-Arabic script, which reads from right to left. When India was partitioned andPakistan was established as a separate nation in 1947, the distinction between thetwo forms of the dialect became a matter of constitution, at which point, the idea of aHindustani dialect fell into disuse.Urdu, as the language of subcontinental Muslims, is heavily influenced by Arabic, andmany Arabic, Persian and even Turkish words have come into the language, replacingthe old Sanskrit ones that remain in Hindi.BengaliBengali is the national language of Bangladesh, and is spoken by almost all thepopulation (some 100 million). It is also spoken by around 60 million people living inthe old state of Bengal in north eastern India. Bangladeshi speakers tend to beMuslims while Indian speakers tend to be Hindus, and this may occasionally give riseto variances in the way the language is used.The cultural life of Bengal has produced at least one globally known figure in the arts –the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who won the Nobel Prize forliterature in 1913.GujaratiThis is the language of the state of Gujarat, which is situated in the extreme northwest of India, bordering Pakistan and the Arabian Sea. Here there are around 35million Gujarati speakers. Another language which developed out of Sanskrit, it alsohas its own script, which is similar to that of Hindi and Bengali but without the barrunning across the top of each character.Significant numbers of UK Gujarati-speakers have come from East Africa, rather thanIndia. Whole families emigrated to Kenya and Uganda in the 1950s only to findthemselves deported in the 1970s, during the “Africanisation” programmes brought inby the governments of those countries.32