 We have been talking about fundamentals of language these days and I will continue the same discussion further. What we have looked at so far is what is language, what is linguistics, how we study language and what is it that we study and we have been looking at language from its external perspective. We talked about differences between language and a language or languages and then we talked about a language and a language. These days what we are discussing is certain way to fundamental aspects of language for us to be aware of the whole idea of language. What we speak, what other people speak, how many languages we speak in India, how many languages are spoken around the world and so on. So let me introduce you to one more aspect in such direction which are related to what we were discussing last time was, what was that we were discussing last time? We were talking about language policy, state policy on language. So we will get there but let us look at this. We have also looked at or we have mentioned that linguists or the whole domain of study of language makes underlying rules, systematic rules explicit to the community to the to whoever wants to understand about language and such rules are part of system. In that direction I found something very interesting. One of the one of very famous anthropologist writes about research in the area of language. This was published in annual review of anthropology as I have told you language is also studied by anthropologists. Have you heard this word anthropologist before? What do they study? Humans, humans they study society, culture, behavior and many other things from the perspective of humans. We are also studying something about humans but we are looking at just one aspect of that which is language and there is an interaction between the two or intersection between the two which is so natural that is called anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology. Those things are separate. All I want you to understand is anthropologists are aware of these things and what she writes is language increasingly will be a natural part of research domain in the fields ranging from computer science to industrial sociology. As a matter of interesting thing, she wrote this thing in 1984. This is not a recent publication. Around 1984 it was very difficult to imagine this breadth of language research. In fact just a few years ago or in the decade before people had even started looking at interactions or intersections between language and computers. So she was familiar with that and then she talks about the domains of research that it is going to be relevant for all kinds of people that is all she means by beginning from computer science to industrial sociology. And then in the days ahead the foundational knowledge about language that has come from linguistics will be like certain principles of mathematics, physics and biology. Do you understand this part? It simply means that lot of things that has come from study of language or probably will come from a study of language are going to be like general knowledge. If we know about Newton's law that is not anymore knowledge of physics. Of course that is part of physics but that is not any more knowledge of physics. It is general knowledge, you get my point? Similarly if we know how to calculate, how to add or how to subtract or multiply, can someone claim that I know mathematics? That is not mathematics, that is general knowledge. That is the sign she is talking about that it is going to be very fascinating in the days to come and these things are going to be very significant for people studying variety of things in different domains. These are the questions we were looking at. I have modified some of the questions for us to look at. So, we speak around 1,600 some languages in India that is a huge number of languages which is approximately 25 to 30 percent of total languages spoken all over the world that is a huge number. It is not very surprising for us because we have one sixth of world population too but still 25 to 30 percent of languages of the world spoken in this geography is a big thing. That is what makes this place hugely diverse and linguistically diverse geography. The next question that I want to address is keeping e-language in mind, where does one stop and the other begins? That is where does one language stop and the other begins? Let me clarify this question to you. Do we know, let me put it this way. We have two languages let us say Telugu and Tamil. Do you know any point in between these two states where these two languages are spoken? And when I say a state I am just mentioning the names of the state where one stops and the other begins. Is there any boundary line where on the other side of the boundary line people speak only Telugu and this side of the boundary line people speak only Tamil. There is nothing as such. If that is true then this is true for all the languages of the world. Get it? Then how do we count them? See this thing? Another aspect that I want to draw your attention to is the names that we give to languages are for the sake of convenience and when we go further then the two languages are more separable from one another. Now imagine a situation, I want to use this board. Imagine a situation where I want to give you separate examples of let us say this is Assamese and then this is Bengali, this is Aurya and this is Telugu. Are you familiar with the map of India, geography of India? Look at this carefully. As you say there is no point on the line where one stops and the other begins. But we still know that after Assam we find West Bengal where people speak Bengali. There must be an area on that line where people speak both of them. If we look at it more carefully, do people of this land speak one or the other or both or something else? Get this question? Similarly people here at the borders of West Bengal and Odisha. Do people speak Bengali, Odia, both or something else? Unlike wise here and then we can have the same continuum for many things where we have Tamil or we have let us say Malayalam, get this thing? Now the point is language happens to be a continuum. We can cut on the same continuum chunks and say these people speak Assamese, these people speak Bengali, these people speak Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam. If we are looking at some other continuum, we can say Marathi, Gujarati, Marathi, Canada, Malayalam. Get it? There is an interesting story on that continuum. The convergence area, these things, these parts are called convergence areas. One of the convergence area of Marathi and Canada has resulted into a new language. Does anyone know the name of that? Konkani. Right? This language is no more a mixture of the two, people do not look at it as mixture of the two. However, that is how it emerged. There was a chunk, there was an area and I do not mean it in a disrespectful way where people did not know what these guys are speaking. Are they speaking Marathi or Canada? And nobody would ask these questions and those people did not need to explain this to anyone and this gives birth to something new which is called Konkani. Now again this name has nothing to do with this, that area is called Konkani area. People speaking either one of the two or both of them or a combination of the two or something else, they started calling their language Konkani and that is one of the official languages of this country now. Whether it becomes official or not, whether it becomes respectable or not, but this is the story of all the languages, is this point clear to everybody? And as a smart engineers I want you to know one more thing. Actually this continuum does not look like this as it looks on the board. I am calling it a continuum but it is not as neat looking as it may be. It could also look like and let us say because we do not cut languages, I do not know how to draw but this drawing is still perfect as long as we are talking about languages. We do not know the names of these languages or for that matter let us say we know but all of them have different areas of such areas and they could still be continuum where all I am trying to say is no matter how neat you want this continuum to look, how ugly you want it to look but the story does not change, get my point? This has to do, this has something to do with 1652 languages where we are comfortable with the names of 1650 or 1700 whatever the numbers may be but in that number we are not taking care of these things and I want you to be aware that whether we count them or not they exist therefore to some extent it is almost impossible to even count total number of languages. If you start looking at people and then you ask people upon some kind of force they will tell you I speak either Telugu or Tamil but they may be speaking something else and this kind of situation for that matter exists within languages too. Right now we are talking about areas of convergence across two languages but this exists within language too where if you are familiar with this thing you will understand what I mean. If we talk about Malayalam we have Northern Malayalam, Central Malayalam and Stravancore Malayalam. Anyone here familiar with these terms? Anyone here familiar with these terms? Anybody speaks Malayalam here? You speak Malayalam. Great. Are you familiar with these terms? There is something called Northern Malayalam spoken in Northern parts, Central Malayalam and then Stravancore Malayalam. Now the fact that this distinction exists within the language they must exist on the basis of something and right now we are not discussing that something. That something could be on the basis of social structure, on the basis of regional structure or some differences within the language and the levels of sounds or structure or something may be all of them but this distinction exists and if you study more of these things as part of e-language and bring in lots of socio-psychological, socio-politicals into this thing then you come to know that Stravancore Malayalam is more prestigious than the rest of the two and again the same thing happens to everything else. If we are talking about Marathi then there could be lots of different varieties of Marathi but broadly speaking there are Pune Marathi and Nagpur Marathi. Pune Marathi is more prestigious than Nagpur Marathi and the reason why I am mentioning these things to you is people who speak Nagpur Marathi, they do not feel good about it when you tell them Pune Marathi is more prestigious. Likewise, people who speak Northern Malayalam or Central Malayalam would not feel great if you tell them Stravancore Malayalam is more prestigious and for that matter it is not what I am saying that this is more prestigious than the other. They decide these things among themselves and again there are variety of reasons. I repeat this thing again to you, I am talking about these things only for us to be familiar and sensitive about these things when we get into the details of i-language. We have these things in our mind as well. So do you see the story or the picture is same within the language also? So how do we count them? It is just not even possible. Still the 1652 number comes which is an output of a project on Linguistic Survey of India done by George Griesen which was completed in 1930 and that book, that survey, that project report is published in 18 volumes, this thick volumes and that is still one of the most authentic sources on different types of languages and we refer back and forth to these things because they talk about people, their lifestyle, structures, sounds of all those languages. So it is basically type of an encyclopedia or dictionary for all these languages and that is how we know 1652. Another part of that is all these languages are from five different language families of India and the names of these families are, I will come back to this slide again. So I want you to see, yeah, these are the names of language families of India. Indo-Aryan family of languages, Dravidian family of languages, Austro-Asiatic or Munda, Tibetoburman and Andamanese. The family of languages within this group of Andamanese is spoken in Andaman and Nicobar islands. Are we familiar with this Andaman and Nicobar islands? That is part of us, right? Similarly, there are other group of islands that are part of us, can you tell me the name? Lakshadev. Lakshadev, great. Do you know the name of languages spoken in Lakshadev? Sorry? Malayalam. Malayalam is one of them, there are many others but Malayalam is one of them and now when we say many others or many languages, I want you to keep this picture in mind, okay. This is the real picture of language, spoken either in India or you replace these names, that becomes true for anywhere in the world. And this picture that you see about Central, Northern Malayalam, Central Malayalam and Travancore Malayalam or Pune Marathi or Nagpur Marathi or let's say Punjabi Hindi, Delhi Hindi, Lucknow Hindi, Vanaras Hindi, Patna Hindi, Kolkata Hindi and go all the way to Agartalam. This story of Hindi or Marathi or Bengali or Tamil or Malayalam that we see is true for English too, is true for all the languages, French, German, Greek. So this is what I mean when I say this is the actual picture of language that is beyond languages within language and this is what I mean when I say it's almost difficult to count them. However, for our convenience we still broadly divide them into Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and all. Coming back to family of languages, so there is a set of languages spoken in Andaman and Nikovar islands until very recently, this family was not known to many people. So people will either think these languages belong to Indo-Aryan family of languages or Dravidian family of languages which in other words meant who cares, right. But very recently a group of scholars from one of the famous universities of India they went there to study these things and found substantial evidence to point out that these languages belong neither to Indo-Aryan family of languages nor to Dravidian family of languages and they have their own distinct classification system. They have their own system and then they also found that there are a lot of languages spoken in that area. It's not just one or two, it's more than 50 to 60 varieties or 60 different languages spoken there. Since I began with Andamanese now let me go to Tibetoburman. This term Tibetoburman has very little to do with either Tibet or Burma. It's just the name of language, languages spoken in particular area and these languages under this category are spoken in northeastern states of our country and hills or foothills of Himalayas, okay. These are Tibetoburman languages and again any idea how many languages could be, do you know how many states are there in northeastern parts? So I am sure you know the names as well, right. So if we talk about languages then what would be the languages from that part that you can predict or you know. So give me one name of one state, Assam, another Manipuri. So what is the language of Manipuri? Manipuri. Let me say Manipuri. There are other names but Manipuri. Another state? Meghalaya. Meghalaya. Language? I don't know. That's okay. Other states? Arunachal Pradesh. Arunachal Pradesh. Languages? Or language? I don't know. That's fine. Another? Tripura. Languages? Tripuri. No, there is nothing called Tripuri. Sikkim. Sikkim is not in that 7. Sikkim is on the other side. Mizoram. Mizoram. Language? Mizo. Mizo. You see that? So there are some languages that we know the names of, some we don't. But total number of languages to your surprise, the total number is more than 500. More than 500. And most of those names are also representative of, not the state names, but representative of their tribes, okay. And therefore they are also called tribal languages. But I want you to know that calling a group of languages, tribal languages, is not insensitive or apolitical, as long as you don't associate specific meanings to them. As long as they are just names, they are okay, alright. Now Austro-Asiatic languages. This group of languages is spoken in what we know as modern Chhattisgarh. And little bit outer circles of Chhattisgarh, which is Jharkhand, western part of West Bengal, northern parts of Orissa, even modern Orissa. Some parts of Madhya Pradesh and UP. That will be the pocket where Austro-Asiatic languages or languages of Munda group are spoken. Isolated. For example, the rest of the regions may be an Indo-Aryan language. Right. So why is that region alone isolated? It's not about that reason. It's about these languages, languages from this group are spoken in that region. They have an ancestry attached to it. There is definitely, see, this classification is called genealogical classification. Which means some aspects of associations within these languages are similar. This classification is not based on formal properties of languages. By formal properties, I mean structure of sentences or structure of language. According to formal properties of languages, there are only three types. Languages could be either verb final, verb medial, like English, or verb initial. There are only three types of languages according to that classification. Now why that area is specific to that? So one of the answers could be, and I would fairly accept it if it is not very convincing, that these languages are spoken in that area. That's it. Why are the Viridian languages spoken towards south? No. Australia and... No, no, no, no. You don't have to read the names that way. It may be because of the geography, because earlier all were the tectonic plates for example. No, no. And even if they were that way, I don't know. Like I said, about Tibeto-Burman, it has nothing to do with either Tibet or Burma. Similarly, Austro-Asiatic has nothing to do with Australia or Asia. This is a name. And if you don't like that name, I have given you another one. So you can just choose that one. India languages. We have Viridian languages which you know Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and these are not just four of them. There are lots of other languages spoken in this area. Couple of Viridian languages are spoken in Austro-Asiatic region also. And foreign languages of the Viridian family are spoken in Hindu-Kush range of mountains. Do you know where Hindu-Kush range of mountains are? In according to modern geography, where is Hindu-Kush located? Pakistan, north-western Pakistan and Afghanistan border, very nice. So some of the languages of that region are also called Tibeto-Burman languages. Now, rest of the languages that you see, beginning from Kashmiri, Doghari to Hindi, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Odia, Bangla, all of them are Indo-Aryan languages. And they are approximately 7 to 800 of them. And to wind that part up, a couple of interesting facts. Do you know the major languages of Sri Lanka, Tamil and Singhalese? Tamil is Viridian and Singhalese is Indo-Aryan. Singhalese is spoken in Sri Lanka is not Viridian. And I am telling you this interesting fact just so that you do not associate these things to geography. And also we see patches of Viridian languages in Hindu-Kush and in the central Austro-Aesthetic parts. There could be reasons behind this. Some speakers congregated in one area, some speakers migrated from one place to the other. These could be the reasons for that. But we do not have substantial evidence to document or show those things. Proof for that is not available. Biggest state of northeast, Assam, language, Assamese. Assamese is Indo-Aryan language. Assamese is not Viridian, I am sorry, is not Tibetan. Assamese, okay, now one more thing, somebody was talking about Meghalaya. There are two languages spoken in Meghalaya, I mean, there are many, but two prominent languages, one is out of the two, one is Khasi. Anyone has heard this name before? Khasi? No. You have heard this name, okay. The language Khasi is interesting because you remember formal classification that I just told you, verb initial, verb medial, verb final, English is verb medial. And Tamil is verb final. In fact, all the 1652 languages that you found are verb final languages. All of them are verb final, except Khasi. So all the languages spoken in India are verb final languages except that one, Khasi, which happens to be verb medial language, alright. So these are some of the things we should know about our languages. These are spoken around the world and languages that we speak. There is one language which is missing from our discussion and I want to conclude this discussion with that, which is Sanskrit. Have you heard this name? Who speaks Sanskrit? Do you know anybody who speaks Sanskrit? But do they not speak Kashmiri? There is a village in Karnataka where they speak only Sanskrit. There is one village in Karnataka where they speak Sanskrit. Let me refine my question and I have nothing to reject or deny these things. Do you know anybody around you who grew up speaking Sanskrit? Like you grew up speaking which language? Malayalam. You? Tamil. You? It sounds little bit difficult to believe. Do you speak any language other than Hindi? That's it? Where are you from? Madhya Pradesh. Okay. I'll talk to you about that. It sounds difficult. The reason why I am saying, there is nothing sarcastic about this. Please don't take it otherwise. Hindi is spoken. Do you know where Hindi is spoken in India? If we talk about Malayalam, we know where it is spoken. If we talk about Tamil, we know where it is spoken. If we talk about Hindi, where is it spoken? Northern plains. Give me the names. Let's be specific. Beginning from Madhya Pradesh. Is it spoken in Rajasthan? Delhi. UP. Bihar. Haryana. Punjab. Now let me rephrase the question. Is it not spoken in Maharashtra? Hindi is spoken. Is Punjabi not spoken in Delhi? If we say Hindi is spoken in Haryana, is Haryanvi not spoken in Haryana? You can raise a question. What are you talking about? I am talking about this. And I am also talking about Hindi that it is spoken particularly nowhere and specifically everywhere. The only difference is Hindi spoken in Delhi is very different from Hindi spoken in Mumbai or for that matter in Kolkata. The reason why I stopped there and asked him if there are other languages is in that situation it is difficult to say am I speaking really Hindi or if I am speaking Hindi which Hindi? Among Hindi speakers if I can categorically figure out that you are speaking Kolkata Hindi or you are speaking Bombay Hindi or you are speaking Hindi from Delhi. Then with all seriousness that this question deserves we need to see that there are striking differences within the language as well more striking than probably this one. So are we really talking about Hindi? Where is this spoken? Trust me I told you right yesterday that I am not attaching either any kind of sarcasm or emotional affiliations with these things. I am only talking purely in terms of scientific aspects of these languages and on the basis of evidence. And I hope you agree with these things that I am telling you. We do not need a microscope to see these things. We do not need a laboratory to figure out these distinctions. This is why if I can tell you at this point it is said about study of language that the laboratory for study of language begins where other laboratories end which is rest of the society. We are talking about Sanskrit. So do you know anybody, so you know yourself and you know other people who grew up speaking Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi also. But do you know anyone who grew up speaking Sanskrit? No. Some people may be speaking Kashmiri Pandit or Pandit from anywhere else. They may think they are speaking Sanskrit but do they really speak Sanskrit? No. Now again this is not a matter of fun. This is the reason why it is said the Sanskrit is dead language which that does not mean there is no document available in Sanskrit. That simply means no one speaks Sanskrit. And this is the story of not Sanskrit alone. This is also the story of Latin. No one speaks Latin anymore. Both of them used to be very prestigious and famous languages at one point in time. What do you think is common between the death of both? The lightism. Exactly. And many things associated with that. I do not want to go into that direction. The speakers of those languages Sanskrit at one point they would not allow others to learn that language. Are you familiar with this? People who taught Sanskrit through whatever they taught they would not allow everyone to go to school. If you stop or if you do things like that to languages the languages do not like that. And on the other side of the same story languages that you see with wider spread or with maximum number of speakers are the languages that are flexible, that are welcoming in incorporating everything else. So if you look at the book one of the reasons why English is so famous and spoken all over the world is not just because English was the language of British Empire and British Empire was spread all over the world of course that was one of the reasons. But the other reason which is more convincing and scientific is if you examine the vocabulary list of English it has borrowed and neutralized and internalized vocabulary from all parts of the world. So much so that sometimes even we talk that several words that you may be familiar with as words of Hindi like jungle, dharma, dhoti, rasgulla are good words of English. They are part of Oxford English Dictionary. And this happens only as part of its acceptability. That is what helps spread of it. And that is the reason of the other side of the story is the reason for death of Sanskrit. With this anecdote what I wanted to say Sanskrit is not part of any one of these families. Sanskrit is neither Indo-Aryan nor Dravidian, definitely not Munda, Tibetoburman or Andamanese. Sanskrit was spoken by Aryans. Again the word Aryan does refer to Aryans that we know but Sanskrit not was is part of Indo-European family of languages. And with these names if we go up in the tree structure in the structure of families then we go all the way to Indo-European. And Sanskrit is part of Indo-European like Latin. Therefore Sanskrit is closer to English than to any one of our languages. And rest of the story is part of history and historical discussions whether it was language of Aryans, whether Aryans came from somewhere else and then they settled in India. Therefore they brought Sanskrit. All these things are part of historical discussions or historical examination. I am not familiar with those things. I will talk to you about what I feel but then that is not authentic for a discussion related to our knowledge of languages or knowledge about languages. Important is Sanskrit is not part of this. Sanskrit is Indo-European and then I just wanted you to be familiar with the idea why these languages are, why these two languages are almost dormant or what we call dead in colloquial terms. Let us look at one more thing. So we talked about different names of language families and now in the remaining time quickly we want to talk about language and dialect. So far we have been using the term language or languages with clear distinction between what they mean, what we mean by language, what we mean by languages. And I discussed this thing to you. Whether this means simplifying the picture of language or complicating the story of language, in fact both mean the same thing. Now with this thing in mind, with total number of languages of the world in mind, with languages that we speak in mind, what do you think we mean when we say dialect? I am sure you have heard this word before and you have some idea about that. So would you like to share your ideas with me? Please do not be worried about being wrong or not being accurate. I am only asking you. I do have some of them, I will show them to you but I am asking you to see whether you have heard these terms and where you have heard these terms and what you mean by these terms or what you have been thinking about these terms so far. That is the term is dialect. Language forms with some variations from the major language. Okay, fine. Let me take couple of them and then we talk about them. Do you have something else? I have same script. So it has something to do with the script. Alright, let us take that also. Two people speaking different dialects can still have a conversation and talk but people who speak different languages to you people, they will not be able to converse or have longer complex conversations. So according to that what you are saying is these are dialects. That is Northern Malayalam, Central Malayalam and Travenkor Malayalam are dialects of Malayalam but not Telugu or Tamil is dialect of Assamese. That is it? Alright. We will talk about that also. Anything else? Anyone else? No? Nobody wants to say anything? Do you agree with these things that these people are saying? Yes? Largely yes? Largely yes. Yes? Alright. And what they are saying is absolutely fine. And I do not think they are completely wrong either. We just need to refine them little bit. See, I also have similar things. I found it from different sources. Some people believe a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific reason or a social group is a dialect. A variety of languages that is a characteristics of particular group of languages, language speakers is dialect. A regional speech pattern is a dialect. A dialect may also be defined by other factors such as social class, regional status and all other things. Slang. Are you asking me this question? What is a slang? Are you saying? Completely different. What? They are not completely different languages. They just have a different slang like accent. Wait a minute. These are different terms. Accent, slangs mean completely different things. Slang is probably the term which is used for a language or for a type of language in more of a derogatory terms. Derogatory way. Not derogatory derogatory but in a derogatory sense. And also that could be a common term between only few speakers or a group of some speakers. For example, if there are certain terms that are used only on the campus of IIT Madras, you can say this is IITM slang. Now I want you to understand what I said. Is that true or not? Yes, that is true. But that is not really derogatory as derogatory like some bad words. So what I mean is they are not bad words but they are specific to a group. That group could be smaller and bigger. Technically there are other names for that but this is what we know as slang and then there could be more elaboration of that. The other term that you said, accent. This term accent is also used in some derogatory sense. For example, if I say he speaks English with an accent, what is that supposed to mean? Does it mean that he speaks very good English? No, definitely not. You may not know what it means but you know for sure that this doesn't mean something nice. Am I right? So accent is also one of the terms but accent is used to determine sound quality or sound system to decide whether a particular person's speech or speech of a particular group is close to a standard variety or way too far away from a standard variety and that is only related to sound system. That is called accent. Again, both are used in some sort of derogatory sense. Now what you are referring to to these three varieties of one language is precisely not different slangs. These are three different varieties of the same language. Then again, you can ask this question so what's the difference between a dialect and a variety? So let's first take a look at dialect and give me three, four more minutes and I will be done. And if we need, we can discuss these things more later but since I started this thing, I will be done with this thing. See, like I told you in the beginning keep this picture in mind. It's even difficult and I am repeating this again. With the help of this picture, it helps us understand that it's even difficult to count languages. Can we write any language in any script? I am only asking about possibility. Not that we have to do a possibility. We use English with Roman script. We write Hindi with Devanagari script. Trust me, Roman script was not designed for English. Likewise, Devanagari script was not designed for Hindi. Devanagari script was a script of Sanskrit where language died and a script was retained because it was adapted by other languages. Therefore, a language keeping or maintaining its writing system is no standard of language. Remember, I have been telling you the object of inquiry is a spoken language. You must be familiar with people who can speak but they don't know how to write. Do you know such people? Can we say that they don't know language? We don't. We can't say such things. Ability to write is an additional thing. That does not come with learning language. Remember the Darwinian quote I have told you, you have seen that we see instinctive tendency when we see someone, a child speak but the ability to read, write and breathe is not instinctive tendency. See that, therefore the capacity to write something is an additional learning thing and we can learn to write anything. As long as the discussion of a script is concerned, we can write any language in any script. Then what's the big deal about it? So, script is not a parameter for language, for distinction between language and dialect. At the same time, you haven't mentioned that availability of literature, that is novels, dramas, poetry, if a language has these things then that's language and some other things that do not have these things may be dialects. Again, that's no parameter. It's just a matter of coincidence that Shakespeare wrote in English. Kali Das wrote with Sanskrit and Tulasi Das wrote with Awadi. Sant Gyanesh was wrote in Marathi and Tiruvallur wrote in Tamil. It's just a matter of coincidence. Therefore, availability of literature in any language is no parameter for distinction between language and dialect. In a strict technical sense, in a strict scientific examination, there is absolutely no distinction between what we call a language and what we call a dialect. If we want to call these three as three different varieties, that is okay because these three varieties of a language may have more similarities among one another than dialects. And I am reiterating this thing again that there is no distinction, no scientific distinction, no technical distinction between a language and a dialect. Not even number of speakers. Some languages have huge number of speakers. Some languages have very few number of speakers. Just now I gave you examples of Indo-Aryan languages and Andamanese languages. Get it? So that's not even a parameter for distinction between language and society. Language and dialect. That's simply the two concepts, two ideas are sociopolitically motivated ideas. I stop here.