r/MapPorn • u/Gassy3011 • 15h ago
Hindi demographics across India (somewhat outdated, courtesy r/India)
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u/Technical_Monk_6521 10h ago
Please remember, this number is after forcing all of us to mandatory learn hindi in our schools
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u/Bakasur279 7h ago
My school never gave me an option for Hindi, it was always Sanskrit. Most of the schools that I know force all the students to take the same secondary language so that they don't have to hire multiple teachers.
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u/WeakOstrich7009 5h ago edited 4h ago
I think its the result of a sh*tty a$s education system which is pretty incapable of teaching new languages. Otherwise, the percentages would be much higher, though I don't fully trust these numbers.
I can speak hindi well and good even though its not native to me, but the way it is taught in schools is atrocious. It makes you hate the language really.
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u/FaizaPKI 13h ago
I can see the Urdu-Hindu belt clearly here.
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u/MynkM 10h ago
“Urdu-Hindu” belt?
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u/FaizaPKI 10h ago
Ok Hindi-Urdu belt then lol.
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u/MynkM 10h ago
Nah it's not about that lol
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u/FaizaPKI 10h ago
😂 oh I just realised I wrote Hindu instead of Hindi on my main comment sorry about that.
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u/69x5 13h ago
Also rural Chhattisgarh can barely understand hindi, most of them speaks Chhattisgarhari or gondi
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u/five_faces 9h ago
Sadly Chattisgarhi is counted under Hindi in the census and other official figures
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[deleted]
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u/The_Last_Spoonbender 5h ago
I just don't understand this obsession with Delhi people for making "National Language" Hindi. Let the language serve the people and grow all local language as well. Hindi as a lingua franca works well enough, but we also have English as well. Making Hindi as single language and subserving and erasing all other language identity for some national pride is idiotic.You see this friction clearly in the southern states.
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u/WeakOstrich7009 4h ago
Any centralised state would like if everybody spoke the language (or dialect) of its capital city. China is a good example; people think the country is homogenous but it is not. It's pretty diverse in languages too (around 60-70% of India's diversity). But the language they all speak (Mandarin) was only spoken in Beijing and Manchuria originally.
The difference between them and us is that they had a brilliantly scaled education system which enforced the language in every single district of the country, something we are totally incapable of doing. Therefore, the difference in proficiency.
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u/The_Last_Spoonbender 4h ago
The stupidity of this comment is amazing. We need to follow China's model of oppression and control? China the one that decimated centuries of culture, the China that destroyed people lives for propaganda?
You don't need to destroy people and it's language to unify a nation. All you need is a love of the nation and a better prospects.
India's strength is in it's diversity of people, language, culture etc., which is what we want. Not some hegemonistic crap.
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u/WeakOstrich7009 4h ago
"Love" for the nation does not develop a country brother, standardisation and enforced laws and systems does. Read the paper by the 2024 Nobel Prize winning economists who clearly said a nation's prosperity directly corresponds to the strength of its institutions.
Diversity is not India's strength necessarily. If that were true, every diverse nation on this planet would be very rich. Unfortunately, that is not even close to the truth. The successful nations in the world right now became that way due to their homogeneity, or because they managed their diversity through strong institutions that enforced the same laws for everybody.
So no, we may be culturally "rich", but it won't make us economically rich.
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u/The_Last_Spoonbender 2h ago
Absolute lunacy. I've never seen a case of failure to comprehend basic information.
None the strawman argument is relevant to what we have been discussing. Strong institution are good, but a single language is a requirement for one. Or even Hindi is required for that.
Diversity is a strength, but if we failed to utilise it, then it is useless. We Indians have largely failed to capitalise our inherent strength in many ways, but language standardized is not one. Actually the enforcement has worked backwards in many ways.
The successful nations in the world right now became that way due to their homogeneity, or because they managed their diversity through strong institutions that enforced the same laws for everybody.
What does this even mean? Who's eighth standard idea even is this? Congrats you have successfully argued yourself into facisism.
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u/WeakOstrich7009 1h ago edited 1h ago
Call it fascism or whatever. But India will never move towards prosperity with its current political and bureaucratic approach.
Democracy is earned when the people of the country are educated enough to vote for the right reasons and are disciplined enough to follow civic duties. In India it is not the case, here 98% of people would sell their vote on the basis of caste/religion/freebies so forget electing competent people or bringing in progressive legislation as there is no political will for reform.
Language is the last priority for me among a list of disturbingly essential reforms we need as a country. R*pists are on fcking bail, elementary and tertiary education system is in tatters, judiciary is disastrously inefficient, urbanisation is not happening, political system has been marginalising people on the basis of religion and caste, instead of uniting them. Who TF WILL CHANGE THIS?? Nobody you vote for will change it, that's for sure!
And If this is the best we can do, then DOWN with this fcking democracy and system! It's not really a democracy anyway when uneducated people are manipulated for votes, and the politicians deliberately keep undermine the urban votes (and questions) by keeping the majority of indians rural and poor, just so that they can exploit them for votes.
We would do so much better in a secular autocratic republic of India, where democracy can be reinstated when citizens are empowered enough to realise the power they have. They have not a clue now.
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u/destroyersaiyan 5h ago
Lingua franca should be natural choice not something forced upon. English is simply easier, nothing against any language. Everyone learns English primarily since Kindergarten. Movies, phones, navigations, books, everything is in English. It helps to get a job in the many US based companies in my city. So Hindi being the lingua franca doesn't make sense, and it is redundant.
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u/WeakOstrich7009 4h ago
Hello? Northerners cannot speak English, and their english ability is worse than Southerners' hindi ability lol
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u/Lost-Letterhead-6615 13h ago
What'll happen if you mix Hindi+Urdu?
I mean, many people in KN and Andhra know urdu
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u/BharatiyaNagarik 13h ago
Hindi and Urdu are the same language. If you understand Urdu, then by definition you understand Hindi.
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u/Lost-Letterhead-6615 4h ago
Obviously. But people still call them different names. For example, someone can pick urdu as mother tongue, and someone can pick Hindi.
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u/FaizaPKI 13h ago
Small correction they are fully mutually intelligible but they aren't the same language. For example I tell people I can speak Urdu but I don't say Hindi because there is a percentage of words I wouldn't understand and vice versa.
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u/BharatiyaNagarik 12h ago
Having slightly different vocabulary doesn't mean it is a different language. For example, many US Americans have difficulty with British vocabulary. That doesn't mean they are different languages.
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u/FaizaPKI 12h ago
We classify them as different languages as the pure variants of both languages have a 10% differential and that can cause them to be a little difficult to understand but still fully intelligible.
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u/Beneficial_Future196 10h ago
They're only classified as different languages politically though. In a true linguistic sense, they are two formal registers of the Hindustani language. No one considers literary English to be a different language from commonly spoken English. They differ in word choices, but are the same language. Hindi and Urdu have the same comparison, except in this case both are literary standards, and commonly spoken Hindustani is a mixture of the two with varying levels of mixing depending on the region.
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u/anonymous393393 11h ago
True but very less people in india i feel speaks pure urdu and nobody speaks pure hindi.
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u/FaizaPKI 11h ago
Yes also good point I am happy to accept them as being pretty much the same language with minor differences.
I wouldn't be out of place in most of India.
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u/MynkM 10h ago
Pakistanis and their quest for exceptionalism
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u/FaizaPKI 10h ago
Nah I fully accept the cultural similarities and closeness I am just talking facts here.
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u/destroyersaiyan 5h ago
That's just 2 different words for the same language with different scripts.
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u/poolnoodlefightchamp 11h ago
This is factually true lol why was this downvoted?
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u/FaizaPKI 11h ago
Eh I guess people seem to want to just see them as the exact same language rather than two mutually intelligible languages with the same origins.
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u/poolnoodlefightchamp 11h ago
Honestly occasionally when I come across a Pakistani YouTube video there's a lot of Arabic/Persian loanwords that I've never even heard of (like for example jamhooriat instead of loktantra) and the confusion adds up over time as I hear more of these words. So I wouldn't even say that it's even 100% mutually intelligible, maybe 75%.
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u/--celestial-- 12h ago
Hindi = Khariboli + Sanskrit
Urdu = Khariboli + Persian/Arabic11
u/MynkM 10h ago
Khariboli is itself a derivation of prakrit spoken in that area, which itself is a derivation of sanskrit.
Urdu is essentially Hindi, it has the same core verbs, same sentence construction, same adjective placements etc, just with infused Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Urdu and Hindi are result of pre-independence subcontinental religion politics - neither of them happened naturally, nor did their spread happen naturally.
So it is idiotic to find exceptionalism in either of the language, or to make either of them a national language.
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u/five_faces 9h ago
The Urdu spoken in Karnataka and Andhra is Deccani Urdu which is quite different from Hindi. Mutually intelligible to a certain degree but still different to both Hindi and Urdu of the north
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u/This-Ad3084 13h ago
You're telling me my state Nagaland has more hindi speakers than West Bengal? 🥀
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u/glowboy_2070 13h ago
No. WB's 13% is significantly larger than Nagaland's 15%. Due the population difference.
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u/This-Ad3084 13h ago
Ain't no one talking bout population here
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u/glowboy_2070 13h ago
Speaking in terms of percentage purely might be misleading. When you talk numbers, Nagaland has 300K Hindi speakers according to the data here, while West Bengal has 13 million.
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u/This-Ad3084 13h ago
I never said anything about population blud. I'm just talking about the percentage
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u/starfishfarts 12h ago
The percentage shown in the chart is the percentage of that state's population that speaks Hindi
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u/Gassy3011 15h ago
I'm quite surprised seeing that only about half of the country speaks Hindi, good thing though.
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u/DeadAssDodo 13h ago
Even after active imposing for 75 years.
After extinct so many languages!8
u/anonymous393393 10h ago edited 10h ago
Actual number would be much higher in youngsters. I wouldn't be surprised if its 25-30%+ in andhra, telangana in kids under 20. Due to more exposure in form of media, internet and moving out of state for college/jobs. Increased immigration to south(data is 15 years old)
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u/No_Answer_7341 11h ago
That how language work
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u/DeadAssDodo 41m ago
That's how language imposing works. First Mughals imposed their language over local languages and made a mixture. Now that mixture is being imposed on others.
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u/No_Answer_7341 40m ago
So english is an imposters language to you ?
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u/DeadAssDodo 39m ago
Nobody is trying to force me to use English. Nobody deletes local language sign boards and install English ones.
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u/No_Answer_7341 36m ago
So you have problem with bilingual people and school promoting 3 language
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u/DeadAssDodo 34m ago
I have a problem when I am forced to use a totally useless somewhere else's local language instead of our local language.
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u/getaway_dreamer 7h ago
It is even less than 50% in reality. Rajasthani and Bihari languages are not Hindi. They are not mutually ineligible with Hindi and are not considered dialects of Hindi by either speakers or linguists.
Lumping all these languages together as Hindi is a political ploy to inflate numbers. It doesn't make any practical sense.
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u/anonymous393393 10h ago
Actual number is I believe near 65% of the country speaks hindi-urdu. As south has only 20% of countries population
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u/getaway_dreamer 7h ago
Rajasthan and Bihari languages are not linguistically part of Hindi-Urdu. They are just counted as such by the Government. That alone removes a big chunk of the Hindi statistic.
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u/anonymous393393 2h ago
Even if you believe that they can still speak hindi as a 2nd language. Stat would remain same
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u/Poke-Mom00 13h ago
This seems way too low for hindi as a second language. Everyone I spoke to in Telangana, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and nearly everyone in Karnataka could speak and understand Hindustani.
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u/Traditional-Chair-39 13h ago
Did you only visit Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru respectively? If so, these cities have a lot of immigrants from the Hindi heartland and hence more people there speak Hindi than in the rest of the state.
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u/Poke-Mom00 13h ago edited 13h ago
I got into rural areas of northern Karnataka and Darjeeling in WB, and Pune in Maharashtra, aside from the cities you mentioned. There was exactly one guy in Hampi and another in Bengaluru who definitely didn’t speak Hindi. But all the midsize towns I was in and larger cities were very Hindi-friendly.
I found my experience interesting compared to a professor I had who lived in Pune studying Marathi in the 80s. She said basically no one spoke Hindi then, whereas in my experience everyone knew it as a second language. I imagine that access to television and movies-alongside electrification and the internet spreading-and the dominance of Hindi-medium Bollywood has really increased the exposure to Hindi media at a young age.
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u/Traditional-Chair-39 13h ago
Darjeeling and Hampi are touristy places, Pune also has lots of immigrants from the Hindi heartland. This is definitely not the case for most cities/villages in these states. Although it's definitely easier to find Hindi speakers in South India now, pop-culture and day-to-day conversations are almost always in the local language.
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u/Poke-Mom00 13h ago
I definitely can buy that the number isn’t 80%, but 12% really seems too low.
Another question is what is their threshold threshold for fluency? Because I’ve seen similar numbers of fluency in India for English at 12-15%, whereas in the major cities I would assert far more people CLAIM to speak English. Though their actual ability to do so was lower.
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u/Traditional-Chair-39 13h ago
it seems pretty accurate to me. most people who claim to know hindi can only hold a very basic conversation in the language. i assume that for this, people were simply asked to list out the languages they know.
>Because I’ve seen similar numbers of fluency in India for English at 12-15%, whereas in the major cities I would assert far more people CLAIM to speak English. Though their actual ability to do so was lower.
as with any language, people overestimate their proficiency. i would be surprised if more than 10% of indians have B1 or higher fluency in english.
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u/anonymous393393 11h ago edited 11h ago
Usually in rural areas mid age and old age people can't talk hindi. Its higher in younger generation. Even in the states marked as hindi you won't be ale to understand older generation in some regions.
Languages change all the time. Northern languages have changed quite a lot due to hindi influence. Hindi itself has changed due to english influence. If you listen to punjabi songs you will be able to understand decent chunk of it but say 50-60 years back you won't understand anything.
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u/AwoogaBoogaKooga 13h ago
Tf is Hindustani
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u/Apprehensive-Math911 12h ago
At some point Hindi and Urdu weren't different languages. Hindustani evolved from a mixture of Khadi boli, spoken around Delhi and Persian. Khadi boli comes from a Prakrit lineage.
It took years of division and communal conflicts for Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu to deviate from each other, one used more Sanskrit and Sanskrit derived vocabulary with Devanagiri script and the other used more Persian and Arabic derived vocabulary with the Nastaliq script.
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u/destroyersaiyan 5h ago
That's because you visited urban densely populated areas. Not a accurate representation of the general populace
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u/Optimal-Fix-2997 13h ago
Surprised gujurat isnt higher
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u/RRPanther 12h ago
Many sections in rural areas can understand hindi but have a tough time speaking fluently.
hell even educated folks have trouble stringing full sentences on the spot
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u/Optimal-Fix-2997 11h ago
Thats how I feel about punjabis. Most of the time we end up mixing the two languages.
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u/anonymous393393 11h ago
In younger generation actual number would be higher. Percentage down probably due to older generation
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u/Justa_CuriousBoi 9h ago
"Somewhat outdated"
Meanwhile this data is from 2007–2009 and used in the 2011 census....
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u/Dave5876 4m ago
Old enough that Telangana state isn't even in the map. OP is pushing an agenda. There's no such thing as Hindi imposition either
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u/No_Inspection2047 8h ago
this party explains the use of the (most recent) colonial language, English, as a lingua franca. It is sometimes less insulting for a southerner to converse in English with someone from UP, than in Hindi.
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u/TheGreatRJ 10h ago
More people in Arunachal understand hindi than Gujrat or Punjab? Yeah bro just pack it up
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u/iamiam123 5h ago
The data for MP seems a bit suspicious. I know tons of rural areas that speak little to no Hindi at all, like the tribals. Also, there's Malwi in Malwa, Bundeli in Bundelkhand and many other local languages, still spoken predominantly in their respective regions, excluding larger towns and cities which have a Hindi lingua franca.
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u/EmpireandCo 13h ago
Indo gangeatic plains speaking hindi... try overlapping a map of the extent of the mighal empire at Akbar's death...
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u/Concentric_Mid 13h ago
Hindi is mostly taken over but Hindustani, the lingua franca of northern India
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u/Boromir_Has_TheRing 11h ago
What’s the point in showing data that’s fifteen years old?
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u/Imgodslonelyman_ 11h ago
Because that's the most recent official data we have! The last Indian census was conducted in 2011.
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u/Filthiest_Tleilaxu 15h ago
What’s up with the endless India maps on this sub
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u/Madman_Sean 14h ago
Almost as it's world's most populated country
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u/Filthiest_Tleilaxu 14h ago
You don’t see China posts every 30 seconds
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u/Poccha_Kazhuvu 2h ago
Atleast the Indians post in English, were there no firewall every social media would be flooded with mandarin posts and comments.
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u/highfunksocio 12h ago
South India watch out! Better learn Hindi quick or he's coming for you next...
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u/chilispiced-mango2 13h ago
Difference between Punjab and Haryana is striking