The New Wave of Indian Type
&gt; The language and script change every five hundred miles<p>Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is <i>much</i> more diverse than that.<p>In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that&#x27;s about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. It&#x27;s wonderful, but nuts.<p>That was almost 20 years ago; no doubt it&#x27;s more homogenous now, which is sad to think about. A century ago nearly 80 languages were spoken there, so linguistic diversity has been declining fast. Any effort to preserve it deserves applause.