Teach Yourself Hindi - Book and 2 Audio CDs
Brand New (still shrink wrapped)
* learn how to speak, understand and write hindi
* progress quickly beyond the basics
* explore the language in depth
Teach Yourself Hindi is a complete course in understanding, speaking and writing Hindi, the language spoken by over 275 million people throughout the world. If you are a beginner, or if your Hindi just needs brushing up, this course will progress quickly beyond the basics onto a level where you can communicate with confidence. The course has proved effective as teaching material for both class tuition and individual study.
About the Authors:
Dr. Rupert Snell, co-author, is a Reader in Hindi at SOAS and has been using the current edition as a course book for his students for more than ten years.
Simon Weightman, co-author, also teaches at SOAS.
About the Hindi language:
Hindi, Devanagari: , an Indo-European language spoken all over India in varying degrees and extensively in northern and central India, is one of the two central official languages of India, the other being English. It is part of a language continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati; on the south by Marathi and Konkani; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Bengali; and on the north by Nepali. It is also bordered to the south by the non-Indo-Aryan Kannada.
More precisely, Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani termed khariboli, that emerged as the standard dialect.
The origin of the word Hindi can be traced back to Sanskrit word Sindhu . Zoroastrians who were India's immediate neighbors pronounced "Sindhu" as "Hindu" in their Avestan language. Using the word "Hindu" for "Sindhu", they referred to the people who lived near or across the Sindhu River as "Hindu" and their home as "Hindustan". The Sanskrit word Sindhu in its Avestan form Hindu (for believers of Hindu faith), Hind (for Indian country) and Hindi (for Indian language) passed on to later Iranian languages like Pahlavi and Persian
In modern contexts, the word Hindī comprises Hind "India", and the adjectival suffix ī. Hence Hindī translates to "Indian". In modern times, Hindī as taken to mean "Indian" is chiefly obsolete; it now specifically refers to the language bearing that name.
Demographics
Hindi is the predominant language in the Indian states and union territories of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Linguistic scholars refer to this area as the Hindi belt.Outside these areas, Hindi is widely spoken and understood in cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad, all of which have their own native languages but harbour large communities of people from various parts of India. In fact, it is possible to live and transact business in almost all major cities of India with the knowledge of Hindi
Local variations of Hindi are counted as minority languages in several countries, including Australia, Canada, Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, Nepal, New Zealand, South Africa, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, UK and USA among various other countries around the world.
Number of speakers
Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. According to the 1991 census of India (which encompasses all the dialects of Hindi, including those that might be considered separate languages by some linguists—e.g., Bhojpuri), Hindi is the mother tongue of about 487 million Indians, or about 40% of India's population that year. According to SIL International's Ethnologue, about 180 million people in India regard standard (Khari Boli) Hindi as their mother tongue, and another 300 million use it as a second language. Outside India, Hindi speakers number around 8 million in Nepal, 890,000 in South Africa, 685,000 in Mauritius, 317,000 in the U.S., 233,000 in Yemen, 147,000 in Uganda, 30,000 in Germany, 20,000 in New Zealand and 5,000 in Singapore, while the UK and UAE also have notable populations of Hindi speakers. Hence, according to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), a combination of Hindi and Urdu languages makes it the fifth most spoken language in the world.
Note that because of extreme similarity between Hindi and Urdu, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Hindi and Urdu are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Urdu would not identify themselves as native speakers of Hindi, and vice-versa.
According to Comrie (1998 data), Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world, with 333 million native speakers.
The 337 million number of the 1991 census includes the following:
* Western Hindi
o 180 M: Khariboli
o 13 M: Haryanvi
o 6 M: Kanauji
* Eastern Hindi
o 20 M: Awadhi
o 11 M: Chhattisgarhi
* Bihari
o 45 M: Maithili (since gained independent status)
o 26 M: Bhojpuri
o 11 M: Magadhi
o 2 M: Sadri
* 7 M: Pahari
* 5 M: Rajasthani
From 1991 to 2006, the population of India has grown by about 30% (from 838 to 1,095 million), so that the number of current speakers may be expected to be roughly a third higher than those given above.
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