India is a good country in terms of language diversity.
I made a passing remark in one of a past post before only:
http://sgforums.com/forums/8/topics/348263?page=4#post_8887845
How good were they!
The Tamil Nadu state was the most successful in purging much
traces of Sanskrit vocabulary from their language which the
Sanskritist have tried their ways to penetrate and impurify Tamil.
The Tamils will even die for their language!
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations
The agitation, which lasted three years, was multifaceted and
involved fasts,
conferences, marches, picketing and protests. The government
responded with a crackdown resulting in the death of two protesters
and the arrest of 1,198 persons including women and
children.
On
25 January, a full-scale riot broke out in the southern city
of Madurai,
sparked off by a minor altercation between agitating students and
Congress party members.
The riots spread all over Madras State, continued unabated for the
next two months, and were marked by acts of violence, arson,
looting, police firing and lathi charges
On 25 January 1964, a DMK member, Chinnasamy, committed suicide at Trichy by self immolation,
to protest the "imposition of Hindi". He was
claimed as the first "language martyr" of the second round of the
anti-Hindi struggle by the DMK
and many other Heroic acts (read yourself)
Similar for the Bangladeshis when Pakistan imposed Urdu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_Language_Movement
The students of the University
of Dhaka and
other political activists defied the law and organised a protest on
21 February 1952. The movement reached its climax when police
killed student demonstrators on that day.
This prompted officers and clerks from different organizations,
including colleges, banks and the radio station, to boycott offices
and join the procession. Protesters
burned the offices of two leading pro-government news agencies,
the Jubilee
Press and
the Morning
News.
When a group of students sought to storm into the building,
police opened fire and killed
a number of students,
including Abdus
Salam, Rafiq
Uddin Ahmed, Abul
Barkat and Abdul
Jabbar
What did the Chinese always do?
Just keep quiet and let the government proceed with the
destruction of our own mother tongue
