by Bmblbzzz » 12:52 pm
There was a post on some time ago about the dysjunct between reading and writing in various versions of Chinese. Basically, everyone who speaks Chinese can read Mandarin; but according to whether they speak Mandarin, Cantonese or another Chinese dialect/language, they will read different words, with the same meaning. China's centralised government has succeeded over centuries in unifying the written script but not the language. One of the problems of such a "top-down" script is that it doesn't react well to linguistic developments; Chinese is constantly producing new words like any living language but there is no way of writing them; if you write them phonetically using the closest Mandarin ideogram, they will mean something different to speakers of other variants of Chinese.
The languages of South India are totally unrelated to Hindi. Walk around a South Indian town and you'll probably see several languages used on signs, adverts, shops, etc: the state language eg Kannada or Malayalam, often a more local language such as Coorgi (which will use the same script), and English. You might see Hindi as well, particularly on road signs. If there are cinema posters (and there will be), you'll see something written in Latin script that's not English; it's Latin Hindi. People have no trouble following the plot and dialogue of a Bollywood movie (it's usually not too demanding anyway... ) but they can't read Hindi, so the posters transliterate the title, slogans etc into Latin script. Similarly during the Raj, there were publications, especially those for the army, using Roman Hindi, Roman Tamil, etc, aimed at (English) army officers etc.