World Languages: Hindi

Number 4: Hindi

We’re already at the fourth most spoken language in the world. Can you believe it! This week we will be covering Hindi.

There are roughly 260 million people who speak this language worldwide. This is almost 4 per cent of the world’s population! It is the national language in India, which is the main country where Hindi is spoken along with other countries such as Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Nepal. Hindi is part of the Indo-European language family, and the most closely related language is Urdu.

There are hundreds of different Hindi dialects. This is because of the large region in which it is spoken. While it may be difficult to understand regional dialects, they all use the common writing system; Devanagari script. Devanagari script, which has its origins in the Brahmi script, dates back to the 5th Century B.C.

The Hindi alphabet is comprised of 11 vowels and 35 consonants. Like English, it is written from left to write and each character has its own sound. Unlike English however, all nouns have a gender and all verbs go at the end of the sentence.

If you want to learn this language, English speakers would have a moderate difficulty learning the language. While many of the words look, and sound the same, the Hindi alphabet would be an essential part.

References
http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/facts.shtml

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm