This week we’re looking at a language whose name means ‘the language of the land of the Indus River.’ With nearly 425 million people speaking it as their first language, here is Bloomsbury Linguistics’ Five Fun Facts about Hindi!
1) Hindi is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, and is the native language of people living in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhans, Madhya Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan. The 1950 Indian constitution declared Hindi to be the official language of the Federal Government of India, although in fact English continues to be used as an official language alongside it.
2) Unlike many European languages, Hindi doesn’t have articles and, because each character has a different sound, words are written as they are pronounced. This makes Hindi fairly easy to read. However, the sentence structure is very different from languages such as English, with verbs always going at the end of sentences. So, आप कैसे हैं, meaning ‘How are you?’ is actually written ‘You how are.’
3) Many words in English have a Hindi origin, including jungle, bungalow, looting and thug. On the other hand, Hindi uses a lot of English words which are read and pronounced as they are in English, but written in Hindi’s Devanagari script. For example, डॉक्टर is pronounced 'doctor' and स्टेशन is pronounced 'station.'
4) Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu (the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan) are the same language. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and uses more Sanskrit words, whereas Urdu is written in the Persian script and uses more Persian words. Urdu and Hindi are nearly identical in basic structure and grammar, and at a colloquial level also in vocabulary and phonology.
5) Hindi can be found on the internet, but a lack of standard encoding means that many search engines cannot be used to locate text. However, Hindi has had an impact on the language of technology with words such as avatar being used in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Mandarin!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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