It’s interesting talking in shops to people from South Asia (India, Bangla Desh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) about their linguistic heritage.

There are a multitude of languages spoken and written in this wide area, and I hope that my timid attempts to introduce a few simple words from these languages do not offend people who speak these languagesded. I briefly studied Sanskrit, the ancient classical language of northern India, and can still recite some passages from the Mahabharata, an ancient epic about a legendary king the great warrior Nala, who as well as some outstanding personal virtues, was an expert in preparing and using horses for battle in warfare. The Sanskrit term ‘ashvakovidah’ describes his remarkable knowledge of horses.

The major language of northern India is Hindi, a descendant of Sanskrit, a remote relative of English in the Indo-European linguistic group. You can perhaps notice a slight connection between ‘ek do tiin cha paach che saat aat nor das’ and numbers from one to ten in English and other European languages.

Hindi, like its ancestor Sanskrit is written in the Devanagari (which means the city writing of the gods) script, where the characters hang down from a horizontal line. Hindi and Urdu, the national language of Pakistan are mutually intelligible, but there are nationalistic feelings that encourage users to emphasise the difference between these two languages. The word ‘pushtuk’, meaning book in Hindi is ‘al kitaab’ in Urdu, reflecting the influence of the Arabic world.

As well as my knowledge of Hindi numbers from one to ten I can still count to ten in Hindi and explain in Hindi that I don’t actually speak the language (Me hindi nahii purta huu’). Hindi is related to the north Indian/Pakistan language Gujerati, which has speakers in businesses in Lydney and Yorkley.

But I have noticed recently the number of people in shops and hospitals that speak languages not related to languages of the north at all. There is a Dravidian group of languages, which include Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, with speakers in south India and in Sri Lanka. My wife and I learned a few words of Malayalam, to thank a helpful and friendly at the local hospital, and Tamil appears to be the most widely spoken language after English to be used in Forest shopkeepers. I have learned ‘vanakkam’

and Nandri to show some acknowledgement of the Tamil language. ‘Vanakkam’ serves as ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, accompanied by a little bow with closed hands to show respect. My other Tamil word is tandri, a useful word to express thanks after a successful shopping expedition.

Vanakkam! (with a little bow).