The Invisible Majority: Hindi - Page 2
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Native language of about 182 million and second language to a further 300 million Indians, Hindi is also spoken by about 8 million Nepalis. Another two million-odd speakers live in Africa, 200,000 in North America, with perhaps 350,000 others scattered as far afield as the Middle East, Fiji, New Zealand, the Caribbean, the UK, and Germany.
Plenty of media presence
An important factor in Hindi's strapping health is the runaway success of Baliwood, another Invisible India Syndrome sufferer. India produces more movies per annum than any nation except the US, and even the Americans would do well to look sharp. Almost all of these movies, wildly popular among Indians, expats, and film buffs the world over, are in Hindi. That the typical Baliwood production is a musical has given rise to a symbiotic relationship between Hindi's rich historical bardic tradition and contemporary cinema's support and modernisation of same. The Internet positively hums (no pun intended) with huge Hindi song clearinghouses, many largely or entirely devoted to Baliwood soundtracks.
Writing system no barrier
Hindi uses Sanskrit's Devanagari character set, with minor variations. In order to load Hindi pages, computers and browsers have to be Devanagari-ready. Speakers have proven themselves equal to the task, creating a plethora of responses to this problem, of which ITRANS software is the only the most common example.
Thanks to their efforts, the Net positively groans with Hindi-language and related sites. A cursory survey of learning resources includes K. Machida's electronic dictionary, an overview of Hindi grammar, Australia's Open Learning Hindi, Surendra Gambhir's online course, and another (Windows-dependent) course from UKIndia.
Jagran, which claims to be the Net's biggest Hindi portal, is a good place to start a Hindi-language surf, and Milap and Naidunia each claim to have been the first Hindi newspapers online. Beyond that, a simple search engine query will net hundreds of other sites for the Hindi-literate or -curious.
One-mitten world power
Here's a challenge: from now on, whenever you hear or read commentary on planetary linguistics issues, count how many times Hindi comes up. If your experience is like mine, you'll seldom have to remove more than one mitten.
Maybe it's a Canadian thing, but I don't get it.
This article is available from Suite 101 World Languages: www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/world_languages
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