Glad you asked, as this article reminded me of that. Outside of Northern China, where Mandarin is original dialect, the answer is no, Mandarin is not understood throughout the country on a level that English is in the US.
It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except for the North where it's from.
The frequency of overhearing people asking each other for more clarification showed me that language barriers existed, even among university students. English by contrast is much more consistent and far less ambiguous among accents and dialects across the globe.
At first when people complimented me on my English, I didn't really understand why until I realized most Chinese are not fluent in Mandarin in the way I am fluent in English. It seemed they thought the same fluency disparity would exist among US natives with English.
I experienced the same in India a few month ago, when I traveled the length of the west coast with an Indian friend of mine. Coming from the US, I never appreciated how diverse the country is, especially with language. In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.
It blew my mind a little bit, especially realizing the administrative nightmare it must be to run a country of over 1.3 billion people with so many languages.
If you look at any Indian currency bill (Rupee), you'd see the denomination written in words in 22 languages, though in a smaller font. Those are the official languages of India. The official languages of the central government are Hindi and English. All government communications between the central government and state governments or between state governments commonly happen in English because India does not have one language identified as a "national language". Administrative nightmares are avoided by the use of English, which then gets translated to local languages as required. Apart from the 22 official languages, there are nearly a thousand languages/dialects (the distinctions are quite hazy) spoken in the country.
What your Indian friend experienced could be because of an assumption that many people in the north make about Hindi being the lingua franca around the country. The truth is that while Bollywood has made Hindi more widespread than it otherwise would be, every section of the country its non-Hindi languages, be it west, east, north east or the south, resists the imposition of Hindi by governments. People in many states, not just in the south, may not even understand Hindi or speak it even if their languages are closer to Hindi.
Among Indians, only someone from some of the northern states (where Hindi is the official language) would mistakenly think of Hindi as a "national language" or a bridge language.
Can attest to this as someone who has Indian parents but not born in India. You can get further with English than you would with Hindi in some parts.
It seems India’s education has done well for introducing English to the young kids.
You still have huge language barriers. I am impressed by the diversity of the world. m
Most software is still very US centric and that makes me sad at times. English became a standard because the Victorian empire was very good at colonizing and pushing their ideas down other cultures’ throats. Good for them.
But when one learns other languages, you begin to realize how broken and inconsistent English is. If English would be a programming language, it would be PHP.
Every language has its ups and downs. English is broken and inconsistent, but compared to, say, German (which I'm learning now), at least the core grammar is less complicated, it's more flexible, and most importantly there are no noun genders goddamn I hate those so much.
I visited a Hyderabad office that used English with each other, not just with me, because half were locals who knew Telugu and half were recent arrivals who knew Hindi.
I knew 4 languages before I went to school. My parents know 2 additional languages (they grew up in a different state) than me. I can't read, speak or write these languages. So, if I travel to the place where they grew up - I'm a tourist.
The more you try to put India in a box to simplify things, the more complex it gets. Joan Robison, a Cambridge Economist once said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
> In the south especially, he often struggled just as much as me to communicate with people from his own country, despite being fluent in both Hindi and English.
The languages [1] of the 4 southern states of India are somewhat different from Hindi and other northern, central, western and eastern Indian languages (not too sure about the north-eastern states like Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, etc., though I guess even they have some Sanskrit influence, e.g. even two of those state names are Sanskrit-based - Manipur means jewel city and Meghalaya means abode of clouds - roughly).
I say "somewhat different" because, some of the the southern languages do have some Sanskrit influence and Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived words, like the other ones do. I think the others are supposed to have much more Sanskrit influence. For example if you understand Sanskrit you can understand a lot of Hindi, and vice versa. (Studied both in school for some years.)
[1] Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Telugu [2] in Andhra Pradesh (and now Telengana, which split off from Andhra some years ago), and Kannada in Karnataka are the 4 main southern languages, although there are dialects of them, and probably some other less well-known languages too (Tulu is one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language ). The amount of variety and diversity on many fronts in India is amazing.
For example, I did not know for a long time that Modi script was an alternative script earlier used to write the Marathi language.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_language - see the part about it being called "the Italian of the East" :) - I used to think that it was because it is lilting or sort of rolls off your tongue, like Italian (guessing), but saw in the article that it is because words end with vowels in both languages.
It's a kind of second language for many, with younger generations generally being more fluent than their elders. Like the Indonesian dialect, it's somewhat forced by recent government mandate except for the North where it's from.
The frequency of overhearing people asking each other for more clarification showed me that language barriers existed, even among university students. English by contrast is much more consistent and far less ambiguous among accents and dialects across the globe.
At first when people complimented me on my English, I didn't really understand why until I realized most Chinese are not fluent in Mandarin in the way I am fluent in English. It seemed they thought the same fluency disparity would exist among US natives with English.