The Hindi language belongs to India, and the Hindi diaspora settled across the world. It works as a lingua franca in north India. The language is a standardized variety of the ancient Hindustani language, Sanskrit. Hindi is one of the official languages of India. The other one is English. It has emerged as the fastest-growing language globally and is considered to be 4th most spoken language. However, many experts claim that it is the third most spoken if the number of first and second-language speakers are combined. This makes the total number of Hindi speakers around 570 million making it a language worth exploring and investment. A lot of MNCs and big enterprises are making their way to India to tap the Indian market and explore businesses with the help of Hindi translation services. If you are one of them and plan to address the needs of Hindi speakers, it is important that you know the language well enough to offer your products.
A few of the important facts about the Hindi language that can help you with better translation are:
The term ‘Hindi’ has Persian roots
Not many are aware of this fact but the word Hindi comes from the Persian language which is quite surprising considering the historical and religious factors of both languages. Moreover, the Persian language has its words in every second Indo-European language. The term Hindi came from classical Persian where they used to write it as هندی which indicates belonging to Hind or India.
Hindavi term has also been used widely by poets and writers to refer to the Hindi language in the past. Amir Khusru, a famous Persian poet who was active during Delhi Sultanate always mentioned it as ‘Hindavi’ along with others.
Standardization of the Hindi language happened in 1954
The next fact that could help you understand the language is about standardization of the Hindi language. The Indian government worked on a defined Hindi grammar in the year 1954, however, later a basic grammar of modern Hindi was released in the year 1958. Sooner Devnagri was declared the official writing script for the language by the central Hindi directorate. This was mainly done to implement uniformity in the written form of the language. This also made the language different from other languages in terms of writing scripts. It is important to mention here that Devnagri is a complex script and uses a combination of consonants and vowels.Considering the linguistic complexities, it is always better to hire professional Hindi translation services for accurate translations.
Hindi is a hard language to crack
Hindi is an important and popular language across the globe. A lot has been said and talked about this language and its speakers in different multimedia projects by Hollywood and through other important platforms. Being a speaker of English or other Indo-European languages, you need to understand the difficulty level of Hindi as ranked by the Foreign Services Institute (FSI) USA. They have included this language in category IV which is full of languages they find difficult to learn. The students who tend to learn it as a second language require 44 weeks or at least 1100 class hours to reach the basic proficiency level.
Hindi has close mutual intelligibility with these languages
Hindi originated from Sanskrit and is a descendant of the language. However, a language never reaches its present form as it is and has to undergo the journey of evolution. The Hindi language evolved throughout and after taking the forms of Prakrit and Apabharmsa, it has reached what it is called today. The language comes from the Indo-Iranian sub-group of the Indo-European family. So naturally, it has an impact of other fellow languages.
The languages that have a strong influence on Hindi may include Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Arabic English, and a few Dravidian languages which are spoken in India along with Hindi. The Hindi language shares great mutual intelligibility with Urdu, and many new learners get stumbled between both, particularly with the spoken form. Other Indian languages, such as Gujarati, Bengali, and Nepalese also share great similarities with Hindi. Hindi can be a tough language for you to translate especially if you have a background in Ino-European languages. So make sure you always prefer a local and native Hindi translation company to avoid the mistakes and close similarities.
Hindi literature and culture is the most diverse one
The Hindi language has always followed a rich literary tradition with a lot of popular poets and authors such as Tulsidas, Paremchand, Kabir, and others. Other than the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the most prominent features of ancient Hindu mythology, the most translated works include Godan by Munshi Paremchand, Tomb of Sand originally written in Hindi as ‘Ret Samadhi’ by Geetanjli Shree.
Indian culture has a strong impact and Indian soil has been home to diverse cultures and dynasties. Bollywood, the great Indian cinema, has produced masterpieces over the decades and has celebrated a hundred years in entertainment already. All these movies and content are heavily translated into different languages to entertain the masses who speak languages other than Hindi. Netflix India has become one of the high-budgeted franchises of Netflix which is producing series and movies originally for Netflix with subtitles translated into multiple languages.
Conclusion
Hindi is the fastest-growing language, and seeking translation services in Hindi can help businesses tap the most influential market of recent times, i.e. India. A few important facts that you should dig into before Hindi translation may include the origin of Hindi, and its difficulty level, looking into Hindi culture and the entertainment industry along with its mutual inteligibility with other languages.
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