Languages change over time, and in our increasingly global society, that change often consists of assimilating and sharing words and sometimes even grammar principles. Hindi in particular has been subject to mixing with many other languages, due to its geographic location and place in the global business and trade scene.
Hindi is an Indo-European language (as is English) and is most closely related to Sanskrit and Urdu. In fact, Urdu and Hindi have almost identical vocabularies and grammars, with the difference being in the script. Hindi uses the Devangari script while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script. As an example, “Namaste” (hello) would be written नमस्ते in Hindi, and نمستے in Urdu. Some scholars decline to distinguish Hindi and Urdu for this reason, and in some Indian cities the two languages have merged their minor differences to become a sort of hybrid language.
Hindi also uses many, many loan words from English. Even in a lower-SES town you will find people that understand English words like numbers and basic nouns. In higher-SES Indian society, you will often hear constant code-switching as native Hindi speakers switch between Hindi and the business-language of English. Often they switch languages mid-sentence, leaving me in the lurch! This influence of English language and culture on Hindi is obviously because of the British occupancy in India until 1947.
Hindi also shares certain sounds with Arabic, which did not originally occur in Hindi. Certain letters in the Devangari alphabet were modified (by adding a dot) to be able to convey these new sounds from Arabic. For example, Hindi as an aspirated P sound, which, when written with a dot, makes the F sound to accommodate Arabic words. Hindi also has an aspirated K sound which, when written with a dot, makes the guttural KH sound that Arabic has. This hints at the cross-cultural contact between Arab-speaking countries and India, as well as between Islam and India (since Islam is almost always connected with the Arabic language, regardless of the local language).
To go off on a small tangent, one interest thing I have speculated about the connection between this common acceptability of language-switching and Indian/Hindi culture, is that the people seem to use whatever is most useful at the time to achieve a goal. In language, if an English word or phrase best conveys a concept, then that English will be used within an entire sentence of Hindi. Likewise, culturally, people tend to use items for multiple purposes and engage in more creative problem solving than I’ve seen Americans do. This may have something to do with limited resources in India and their culture of making-do with what you have. It’s very interesting to me to think that this value may bleed over into their language use as well.
I think understanding more about language change and inter-language contact is helpful to know, because it can help us create a more complex web of knowledge in our minds. For me specifically, knowing that Hindi shares some vocabulary with Arabic (kursee for chair, for example) is encouraging, as it gives me a little base of vocabulary already. Likewise, although Hindi and English seem so very different, knowing that they are both Indo-European languages makes Hindi seem just a little bit less mysterious.
Comments