The language situation in India is complicated. Indians speak many different languages and dialects. Imagine driving from one state to another, and the language being different. That’s the way it often is in India, depending on where you are.
India has 22 official languages. One of these is English, that being a remnant of India’s years as the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. English is usually sufficient if you only want to communicate with the Indian programmers in your company’s IT department. Beware, however. According to India’s 2011 census, only 10 percent of the Indian population claims to speak English, and almost all of these speak English as a second language, with varying degrees of fluency.
Major languages in India include Punjabi, Tamil, and Gujarati. But if you’re going to learn an indigenous Indian language, Hindi is definitely the one to start with. 57 percent of India speaks Hindi. 43 percent of Indians claim Hindi as their native language. No other Indian language really comes close in raw percentages.
As some of you may know, foreign languages are one of my hobbies and passions. For many years, I used several languages in my corporate work.
Almost all languages interest me, to one degree or another, but I don’t dare attempt to take on all of them. Some I actively avoid, because they’re difficult and the numerical incentives simply aren’t there.
Take Finnish, for example. Finnish is a very challenging language for native English speakers to learn, and no one really speaks it outside of Finland, a country with a population roughly equivalent to that of Wisconsin.
Spanish makes a lot more sense. Spanish is much easier, and is spoken in 20 different countries around the world, with 475 million native speakers.
Hindi is a major language, even though it’s only spoken in India. But Hindi is not an easy language. And until recently, there weren’t many resources for learning it.
Some Americans are rising to the challenge, nonetheless. Margaret MacLeod, a US State Department official, speaks Hindi and has recently become something of a sensation in the Indian media.
According to her State Department biography, MacLeod speaks and reads both Hindi and Urdu. Since I don’t speak Hindi, I can’t personally assess her skill level. But she seems to be fluent, as she fields questions from Indian government officials and journalists with visible ease. Indian commenters in the YouTube videos in which she appears give her high marks, too. I’m therefore willing to assume that she knows Hindi very well.
Yet further evidence that mastery of a foreign language is neither impractical nor infeasible just because one’s native language is English.
-ET