Nuvvu or Meeru

My mother tongue is telugu and after listening to (without always understanding) many Indian languages, I realize that most Indian languages are copies of each other. Any unique feature of a language is immediately plagiarized and presented to its new consumers as original. The syntax is all that varies while the semantics finds parallel in other languages.

This process works so long as the feature that is adapted can locate a void that is to be filled in the linguistic and cultural context of its new host language. After many centuries of this process of assimilation, we see that the mythology, folklore, songs and more recently movies have such close resemblance in the various linguistic cultures that these linguistic communities become parallel mirrors of each other.

So it is that although we have been constantly informed of our linguistic diversity, we find that the talk in these Indian languages is about the same things. All this comes as no surprise. But with a foreign language such as English in the midst of these native tongues, the translations tend to get interesting. The prevalence and acceptance of a foreign language in India too can be explained through the paradigm of a sibling rivalry among the native languages that could only arrive at a truce wherein the lingua franca was foreign, hence everybody lost but no one complained.

But in the bargain, we forget the quirks of our native tongues that define each of our identity. One such central character in many non-western language (or atleast in telugu) is with regard to addressing others (the 2nd and 3rd person singular). The practice of using the plural grammatical number when referring to a single person denotes reverence or submissiveness or respect towards the listener, sometimes a salutation is also used.

e.g: "Nuvvu" and "Meeru" in Telugu (both singular for "you", but the 2nd one uses the plural form).
This is similar to "Tu" and "Aap" in Hindi for "you". But it is taken to another level in hindi/urdu when the singular 1st person is sometimes referred to as "Hum" meaning "We".

Therefore when using an Indian language to address a listener, the speaker looks to pick up clues on background and status so as to accurately place the prospective listener on the social ladder. All the while, the speaker himself tries to project verbally and non-verbally his own perception of self-worth to the listener, so that he is not mistaken for a lesser being. Ofcourse, there is an opportunity for explicit course correction (singular to plural or visa-verse) when this complex dance fails and the judgment is inaccurate but that just shows up the lack of social faculty of the speaker.

This feature is by no means unique to India or even the continent. But to be able to use this single feature, the speaker has to possess vast amounts of social knowledge and skills. It is difficult to always identify where to use the straightforward single grammatical number and where to use the tricky plural grammatical number while faced with a situation demanding a conversation with a random person. Thus the grammatical demand for social information about the listener forces the speaker to get more involved in the society and its hierarchy resulting in better communication.