Lingotopia

I've been always fascinated by the linguistic and cultural diversity of India. When I worked at the University of Tübingen, I coordinated a German language project for Asian students and also had a lot of Indian students. There were no two students with the same mother tongue. One student would speak Kannada, the other Marathi and another one Telugu. Interestingly the Indian students rather spoke English with each other than Hindi. So, whenever I meet an Indian, my first question is always "What's your mother tongue?". That's how I recently heard of the language Odia. Odia is the official language of the state Odisha, located on the eastern coast of India. It has around 40 million native speakers and is one of the six languages, which are awarded classical status in India. The other five are Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. So, when I heard of Odia, I decided to challenge myself to write a little text in Odia, In my previous post about ...