Percentage of Indians that can speak Hindi

Posted by Thelifehacker1

13 Comments

  1. Does anyone know the reason behind such disparity between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam? I am thinking influence of Bengali as a language in Assam probably?

  2. ThePerfectHunter on

    Sadly a lot of the regional languages in the “Hindi” speaking states such as Marwari, Maithili, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali etc are slowly dying as newer generations learn and prefer Hindi over their own native language.

  3. How is communication done in the states with very low Hindi speakers? Is English used as the lingua franca?

  4. NatvoAlterice on

    Use of Hindi in Sikkim really surprised me. Young, old, business owners, taxi drivers, almost everyone I came across knew Hindi at some level. I’d expected more far more English than Hindi.

  5. Is English the Lingua franca in India or do people outside the Hindi speaking areas try to speak it as well? Could India work effectively as a single nation without English (and the British colonial history)?

  6. Reloaded_M-F-ER on

    Problematic figures because various Northern and Central languages are considered Hindi dialects (its also mentioned in that little note down right) and are therefore added into these figures as well as populations elsewhere who actually report Hindi as one of their languages. The actual number of Hindi speakers or those who report Hindi as their first language is around 25% which would mean the 57% should be a maximum of 38%. I say maximum because even that 25% includes a variety of peoples that may report Hindi as their first language but actually speak a distinct language or dialect. An example being how Bhojpuri-speakers are divided between two states, Bihar and UP. However, in Bihar, they are more likely to report Bhojpuri as their mother tongue than in UP even though both regions speak the same language. In some cases, Hindi and the mother tongue are used interchangeably. For example, esp in cities in these regions, people may speak their mother tongue at home but speak Hindi elsewhere even if most people are originally speakers of the same language.

    In these regions, Hindi continues to be a mostly urban-first language and a second language or lingua franca in rural areas.

  7. Sudas_Paijavana on

    This map should not be interpreted as it from a pure linguistics POV, but also from a political POV.

    Many non-Hindi speakers , despite having fluency in Hindi register themselves in Census as non-Hindi speakers due to political differences.

    For example, Hindi is 100% understood in Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, but people choose to register themselves as not knowing non-Hindi as a political statement.

    Same with South Indian states. You get videos for example, of Kannada speakers , saying “Kannada mei baat karo/talk in kannada” in hindi to hindi speakers as form of bullying.

  8. AlwaysBeQuestioning on

    I wonder which languages you’d need to be able to speak to be able to talk with 50+% or even 66+% of the people of every state of India.

  9. Being from Himachal, I believe that the data is incorrect, at least for our state as I know so many people in my family, obviously the elder ones, who cannot speak Hindi even a little bit and can only speak our mother tongue, pahadi. I’m damn sure that there’s no way it could be more than 70-75%

  10. Olhapravocever on

    It’s crazy to me that a country with so many languages and cultural differences between the provinces is an united country 

  11. StruggleHot8676 on

    I don’t know what level of proficiency corresponds to speaking Hindi as a 2nd or 3rd language but I suspect the number 13.8% for West Bengal seems way too low. most people in Kolkata can speak some amount of broken Hindi. the proficiency decreases outside the city but still no where close to zero.