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For those considering studying or learning Hindi, it is useful to give a historical perspective to the language and culture.

Juggernaut, Sherbet – these are just some words which English has borrowed from the Hindi language – yet many people perceive it as a language distant from English. While we all know that Hindi is India’s official language. Hindi is widely used in South Asia, in countries like Pakistan and Nepal. Because the British, in the Empire days, exported many migrant workers to other colonies, places like Fiji and Trinidad have large portions of their population who are Hindi speakers.

 
Fiji has had many coups in its history, but the second to last coup was as a result of indigenous Fijians revolting against the first Indian prime minister to be elected. And the most recent military-led coup claims to have as its motivation a desire for a fairer constitution which recognizes as equals the large Hindi-speaking population of Fiji, who ironically have contributed to the wealth of those who revolted against them. I will, however, stay away from the political commentary.

Only English and Mandarin are spoken more than Hindi worldwide. Hindi evolved from Sanskrit, and in terms of writing script, it is extremely logical and easy to learn. The script has no capital letters. Alphabetically, there are 33 consonants and 11 vowels in Hindi. While many languages have two tiers of address, formal and informal, Hindi goes one step further and has three – formal, familiar, and intimate.

Hindi has been enriched by Persian, Turkish, Farsi, English and Portuguese.
Pakistan’s official language, Urdu, is very similar to Hindi. The language was assembled mainly from Sanskrit words that had been softened for general speech use. The language is rich in epics and classical works of literature.

Learning Hindi is essential as a gateway to one of the oldest civilizations. It is very difficult to comprehend some of the core aspect of Indian civilization without learning Hindi or studying the Hindi language.

If you are thinking of Hindi as an ancient language, you might be surprised to realize that it only became the official language of India in 1950, by constitutional amendment.

Who has not heard of Bollywood? – Hindi movies are huge.

In conclusion, for those seeking to understand Indian culture, and to study a language steeped in epic and classical literature works, Hindi is the correct choice. Hindi is useful from a business perspective also, as the Indian economy has opened up, and many companies, from call centers to software development houses, have operations based in or outsourced to India.

The author operates a Language website. You are invited to view his Learning Hindi Language Recommendations.

An Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language, Hindi is spoken widely in the central and northern part of India. The language, or its dialects, is spoken by about 41 percent of the people of India. Several hundred languages are spoken by the people of India. The estimated number of language used is 415. In terms of language groups, the Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by about 74 percent of the population while the Dravidian languages are spoken by 24 percent, the Austro-Asiatic (Munda) by 1.2 percent and the Tibeto-Burman by 0.6 percent of the population. Some languages spoken by sections of people living in the Himalayas are not yet classified.

Hindi is the official language of India besides English. There are 22 scheduled languages in India and Hindi is one of them. Fiji, where some 48 percent speak dialects of Hindi, has Hindi as one of its official language. The origin of Hindi is said to be Prakrit. It developed local dialects like Braj and Awadhi and evolved into Khari Boli later in the tenth century. Khari Boli, the dialect spoken in the Delhi region, got Sanskritised to become Hindi. It also got Persianised to become Urdu. The persianisation was over a period of a thousand years when the region was ruled by the Mughal kings whose official language was Persian. The neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan also understand Hindi. Some sections of people in Uganda, South Africa and Singapore also speak the language. After Mandarin (Chinese), Hindi-Urdu is ranked second in terms of the most spoken language, spoken by about 429 million people. A broad variety of Hindi languages including Bundeli, Brij Bhasha, Khari Boli, Kannauji, Awadhi, Maithili, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Magadhi and Bihari languages together is considered to constitute the Hindi language.

Hindi language has been standardized for teaching in the schools across the country. The English, Persian and Arabic words have been removed from Hindi and the language further Sanskritised to develop and promote the official Hindi by the government. But the Hindi used by the media is more neutralized. The government of India has the official policy of encouraging people to learn to speak Hindi.

Hindi and Urdu were two standardized form of what is actually one language in the early 19^th century with Hindi being identified with the Devanagari script while Urdu was identified with the Perso-Arabic script. Devanagari script was originally used to write Sanskrit. It was only later that Hindi and Urdu began to be treated as separate languages.