Question:
I think I grasp the cultural rationale for learning Hindi. My family
and I visited India a year or so ago, and we had an incredible time. We
loved traveling about, meeting people, experiencing the Hindu temples -
my children might now be described as converts, etc.
Yet, outside the northern part of the country, most of the Hindi
speakers we encountered also spoke English. I believe this is because,
outside the northern part of the country, one learns English and Hindi
in school.
I genuinely wonder, although we have started learning Hindi, whether we
might be better off learning a regional language. Since the
Hindi-English overlap seems so large, perhaps we are wasting our time on
Hindi. Outside the North, we can communicated in English with nearly
everyone who might understand our Hindi.
Hindi is intellectually engaging. The script is marvelous. Yet I
wonder. What do you think?
Answer:
Do you *appear* to be a person who would be more likely to know English than
Hindi? If yes, most people would start off a conversation with you in
English rather than in an Indian language, because most Indians would expect
a foreigner to speak English rather than Tamil, Hindi, French or German. If
you want people to speak to you in Hindi, you would need to let them know
that you are proficient enough to understand it, otherwise people would
default to English.
One question: Why did you want to learn Hindi in the first place? Was it to
communicate with people in India, or to be able to have access to Hindi
literature, or some other reason?
Yes, if you are going to be interacting with city dwellers in India, north
or south, knowing English or Hindi is enough. Also, in most of South India,
most people can understand and speak a bit of English in the rural areas as
well. They may not know Hindi at all, but would know the regional language.
As far as Hindi goes, if you would like to "speak like a local", you would
still need to choose your locality first, as there are many regional
variations. Would you be frequenting a particular region in India more
often?
Although more and more people know English now, thanks to cable tv
(globalization == americanization), everybody knows at least one Indian
langauge, which is their mother tongue.
Since the structure of most Indian languages is similar, knowing one would
help in others too.
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