LEARN HINDI TODAY
[Lesson 1]
[Lesson 2] [Lesson 3] [Lesson 4] [Lesson 5]
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A brief Introduction India is a vast country whose population of over one
billion prides itself on a rich and varied cultural and linguistic
heritage. Apart from religion and
culture, language is one of the common links that unite the people of India
into one of the greatest nations on Earth. Hindi emerged some two thousand years ago as a distinct
dialect of Sanskrit, the classical language of the Indian subcontinent, and
is currently spoken by more than 500 million people. This makes it one of the
world’s most widely spoken languages. Hindi is the national language of
India and is spoken either as a first or second language especially in the
north of the country: Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Kashmir, Nepal and parts of Pakistan. Due to foreign invasions and occupation, many words of
Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Portuguese and English
origin were imposed in the past on Hindi speakers. Notwithstanding this, the
Hindi language has largely retained its Sanskrit or True Indian (Deshi) character in terms of both sentence structure and
the bulk of the vocabulary (about 90%), and today efforts are made to free it
from unwarranted Non-Indian (Videshi) influences so
that it can regain its original purity and beauty. Most Foreign (Videshi) words in
Hindi represent an undesirable residue of the colonial past. However, as Sanskrit
and Persian are closely related, the use of some Persian-derived words is fairly
tolerable. The same applies to English-derived words for which no Hindi or
Sanskrit equivalent is yet available. Words of Arabic and Turkish origin, on
the other hand, constitute an unnecessary and unacceptable corruption of the
language and will be avoided accordingly by the discerning speaker of Hindi. |