


With so much linguistic diversity on the Indian subcontinent, commonalities like these are striking. Hindi and Kannada, for example, share an entire sound catalog. The structure of the two languages’ alphabets is nearly identical, even while the scripts are different. Their vowels and consonants are mapped onto a grid based on how they are formed in the mouth. The grid is organised the same way in Hindi (Devanagari script) and Kannada. Retroflex consonants form one row of this grid. 

These similarities obscure a more complex relationship. Strictly speaking, Hindi and Kannada aren't related. Hindi is an Indo-European language, part of a family that stretches from Bangladesh to Ireland. Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, and Bengali, spoken in northern India, are in the same family. The Dravidian languages, which include Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam, are mostly limited to southern India. Dravidian grammar is unrelated to Indo-European grammar. Retroflex consonants aren’t generally found in Indo-European languages outside of the subcontinent. But historical linguists suspect that Dravidian retroflexes infiltrated the earliest forms of Sanskrit, and so made their way into Sanskrit's descendants in northern India. 

India's population can be split on hundreds of different lines, with the north-south line one of the most enduring. Could the humble retroflex be a great uniter?