HINDI LANGUAGE

   HINDI is an Indo-Aryan language with about 545 million speakers, 425 million of whom are native speakers. It is the main language used in the northern states of Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar. It is spoken in much of north and central India alongside other languages such as Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi or Bengali.

     More than 180 million people in India regard Hindi as their mother tongue. Another 300 million use it as second language. Outside of India, Hindi speakers are 100,000 in USA; 685,170 in Mauritius; 890,292 in South Africa; 232,760 in Yemen; 147,000 in Uganda; 5,000 in Singapore; 8 million in Nepal; 20,000 in New Zealand; 30,000 in Germany. Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, spoken by about 41 million in Pakistan and other countries, is essentially the same language. Dakhini is an older, southern form of Urdu that uses fewer Persian or Arabic words.

      Devanagari is a syllabary. Like Japanese, all the consonants have a vowel attached and it’s always an “a” unless otherwise indicated. There are 13 vowels and 36 consonants five of which are modified by a dot underneath to make sounds used in the many Arabic and Persian loanwords in Hindi.

     The challenge of learning Devanagari is that consonants and vowels merge to form combined shapes in the script. This means learning some 1,000 combinations if you want to master reading and writing. This “condensing” is intended to make the script aesthetically pleasing and acts to compact the lengths of many words, so for example, newspapers are shorter.