Manorama has a great post about her experience taking Hindi at her university. She is a Bangladeshi-American graduate student, and is studying the language mainly for scholarly/ academic purposes, as I understand it. Her post dovetails nicely with one of the issues raised in my post yesterday — how and whether South Asians in the diaspora end up learning Hindi — and gives me the chance to research and reflect on the status of Hindi and other South Asian languages at American universities in general.
Manorama’s university decided it needed to separate the ‘Heritage’ Hindi students from the ‘non-Heritage’ (i.e., white, in this case) students. Students who grew up in households where Punjabi, Hindi, Gujurati, etc. were spoken generally go in the Heritage section, where less effort is spent on pronunciation and some basic vocabulary, while more effort is spent on grammar and so on. It’s arguably a good idea, though it results in de facto segregation.Here is Manorama:
My current Hindi instructor, from what I gathered, disagrees vehemently with this division between heritage and non-heritage students. The fact that people disagree on this issue is not as troubling to me as the ways in which people in our group were defending their views. A few of my classmates scoffed at the idea of setting up a system which would almost inevitably result in “the brown kids” being put in the heritage class, and how novel of an idea this was, particularly as something the university might support with a rhetoric of ability and non-ability. While it is true that the likelihood of non-South Asian students being in the heritage course is quite slim, it is also true that there are South Asian students who join the non-heritage section. This is what happened in my case; while Bangla is spoken in my home, and while I speak it daily with my parents, Bangla and Hindi are not the same.
Manorama puts herself in the non-heritage class, only to find the teacher (and later, even the students) harshly deriding the approach to learning and overall work ethic of the heritage students in the other section:
My instructor noted that having “heritage students” can be very irritating because the inconsistencies or variations of a language which they learn at home are things which they insist on clinging to in his course. No matter how much he tries to correct them, they persist. Things are done differently regionally in Hindi, and people who have a background in other South Asian languages are reluctant to learn Hindi properly. [. . . snip] However, my instructor went on to say that American students work the hardest, and heritage students don’t. They don’t keep studying, they don’t devote enough time to it, they don’t care. At this point my voice seemed to have completely disappeared from the conversation, and it was as if my physical presence was just an illusion. The fact that I was standing right next to my instructor seemed to not matter–nor the fact that I worked my tail off in first year Hindi and that is why I am a good Hindi student now. And guess what? Skin check: Brown. South Asian. Not American in the sense of culture or lacking exposure to a South Asian language. And in this conversation, apparently, invisible.
As I see it, there are two issues here. One is, many ABCDs have a very odd and inconsistent knowledge of the Indian mother-tongues they (sort of) grew up with. Their knowledge of grammar is poor or non-existent, often regionalized or permuted through another Indian language (in my case, my exposure to Punjabi made some aspects of Hindi, when I studied it at Cornell in the early 1990s, seem off — or ‘wrong’). And yet the same Desi students are often flip about the course, thinking of it as an ‘easy A’ or worse, a social event.
But the instructor seems to be forgetting the main reason this discrepancy may (in some cases) exist, and that is that most of the American students are studying Hindi for academic or (at the graduate level) professional reasons. Most of the South Asian students, on the other hand, are taking it for a vaguer, less focused reason, so it’s no great surprise they slack. The instructor here seemed to forget an obvious surface reason for the discrepancy, and turned it into a quasi-racial distinction.
(I’m going to leave Manorama’s post now to go into some general statistics and issues about learning South Asian languages in U.S. universities, but I encourage people to read the rest of her post at some point)
Foreign Language Study in the U.S.: Systemic Problems
Here’s the thing: this is a tempest in a teapot. The number of universities where Hindi is available is still quite small, and the number of total students taking Hindi in the U.S. every year — Heritage and non-Heritage — is close to miniscule.
A recent study from the Modern Language Association found that the total number of students taking Hindi in the United States in 2002-2003 was 1,430. The number of students studying Urdu was 152. And Bengali, a language spoken by some 200 million people worldwide, was only studied by 54 students in the entire United States!
(Some statistics for background: during the same school year, there were about 1.4 million students in U.S. universities taking foreign languages. 74% of them took either Spanish, French, or German, with Spanish being the most popular by a wide margin.)
Why is the study of South Asian languages so rare here? And is there anything that can be done about it?
One possible factor is the absence of LCTLs in primary and secondary schools (K-12), where only about 38 languages are taught anywhere in the country (and in most schools, only two — French and Spanish — are in fact available). I know some high schools in ethnic enclaves like Yuba City, California and some districts in Queens (PDF) have experimented with offering languages like Punjabi and Bengali. But the overwhelming majority of American students will have never even conceived of a South Asian language as an interesting or worthwhile thing to learn before getting to college. If they take any foreign languages in college, they are likely to continue with what they were doing in high school — French or Spanish.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I wonder if it might be possible to make Hindi, for instance, available to more high schools via metropolitan consortium programs?
Secondly, the professional advantages for an ordinary American student to learn a South Asian language were quite low in the past. I wonder if that might be changing as a result of the Indian high tech boom? People who want to do business with India generally prefer English-speaking Indians, but if you want to go to India, you still need to be able to talk to people on the street. Since students do tend to get more interested in a language if they think it might help them in a business or professional context later (hence the recent boom in interest in Chinese), this could potentially be a major advantage. (Do readers out there have experience with this?)
Third is a practicality issue — many colleges and universities are simply too small or can’t afford to hire full-time faculty to teach South Asian languages. In principle, it is the big research universities and ‘flagship’ state universities that have decent South Asian language programs (the best of which is still the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where you can take Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, and Urdu!).
My own university has about 4,500 undergraduates, of which about 80-100 are likely to be of South Asian descent at a given time. Since only a fraction of them are likely to take Hindi, and only a tiny number of non-desi students are likely to enroll, it would be very difficult here (as at other, comparable places) to justify hiring a full-time professor to teach Hindi-Urdu. Still, Lehigh does have enough desi students to have its own competitive Bhangra team (“LU Bhangra”), so why not have Hindi?
One option for smaller schools might be a program called FLTA, the Foreign Language Teaching Assistant program. Here native speakers come in on a Fulbright (J-1 visa) to teach LCTLs (including South Asian languages), while pursuing their own studies in a non-degree program at the same university where they teach. It might be a good way for Indian post-grads to get some experience in the U.S. (If you know of anyone in the subcontinent who might be interested — and who fits the qualifications for the program — pass it on.)
(Incidentally, I went way beyond the ‘Blogging Call of Duty’ and actually called up the IIE office. They said this year the program has 250 people going to various U.S. universities on the FLTA program, which is a pretty impressive number if you think of the numbers of people those 250 people could potentially be teaching.)
But despite improvements like the FLTA program, the options for South Asian language study in the U.S. remain rather limited at present. And as Manorama’s story indicates, even when you have the chance to do it, the whole experience can be a little twisted.
I took Hindi to fulfil my language requirement for the last 2 semesters at Temple University. When I had registered for the class i had actually wanted to learn the language, but our instructor ended up being an Indian Computer Science Grad Student who took the position since he needed work. for a class like hindi one should take it with someone who has a background not only in the language but also in teaching languages.
Interesting — I wonder how many colleges allow Indian science/math/engineering graduate students to teach Hindi in that vein?
I agree, the chances for a profitable experience in that scenario seem pretty low. Teaching language is a very particular skill; it takes training and experience to learn to do it well.
The FLTA program seems to have an answer to that — it requires that native speaker applicants have experience teaching English in their home countries. It also limits applicants to people in the social sciences and humanities.
I am a resident of Canada and while Hindi/South Asian languages are not offered for study in the public high schools, we do have mandirs and ‘saturday’ school where these languages are taught and can be counted as a credit towards university applications. [ which means you can use eg Hindi grade-12level for one of the 6 courses you need to send to the universities for admission at undergraduate level). I wonder if this would be feasible in the states
Vikrant,
Might be, but in my experience Saturday/Sunday schools at religious institutions aren’t very effective.
The people teaching — here in the U.S. at least — are usually amateurs, there often isn’t adequate supplies or space (classes were conducted in a noisy hall, everyone together), and students sometimes show up only somewhat sporadically (i.e., when their parents feel like driving to temple/Gurdwara/Masjid).
If the quality of teaching at those schools could be made more standardized, then maybe. Do such standards exist in Canda?
For anyone in NYC, I have taken the hindi classes offered by Dr. Jayaraman, in conjunction with the Indian Consulate. He is a wonderful teacher and man, and while the classes may not be on par with a university level, I found them to be incredibly helpful. He also teaches reading/writing skills, as well as grammar and vocabulary.
laugh all you want, nanad, at least I’m trying.
Might want to first worry about ensuring that the new generation in India actually knows Hindi.
Secondly, I propose teaching “filmi Hindi” in schools for these supposed “Heritage” kids. Hindi is dying anyway, and no one wants to know all the nonsense proper Hindi nouns. I’m sure this idea has been thought of before, but I’d be interested to know if someone is offering just a basic vocab/grammar course using transliteration that teaches you enough to watch movies and converse with normal Indian people without sounding like a newspaper.
Hmmm….I’m sniffing another outsourcing opportunity here…..oh…wait…
amit- check my link if you’re in NYC. The classes are 100% applicable daily-use Hindi, not shudh Hindi. He teaches urdu/arabic/persian words, if they are used commonly
Amit and DesiDancer,
That’s key. No one needs “Pustak,” they need “kitab.”
If someone taught a class called “Filmi Hindi” (probably outside of a university ;-)) they would probably get lots of non-Indians interested in deciphering Hindi films and film songs. Could be popular!
Someone should also teach a class called “Punjabi for Bhangra,” which does the same with trying to figure out what “Raatu se daaru peeke/ ki panga paia si? Raatu se daaru peeke/ daso kite aaia si?” means.
Haripa, Amardeep 😉
LCTL = less commonly taught language, for those not versed in language learning acronyms 😉
There is ONE high school in the US that I know offers Hindi – Bellaire HS in Houston. We use their text.
My college is only one in its area to offer Hindi – and at that, the program is struggling. The class was cancelled last fall due to low enrollment (8), and this fall, 14 are signed up, one short of the 15-student prerequisite (which does not apply to upper level Spanish or French and intermediate Chinese or Japanese classes, strangely) and we will see if the class is allowed to form or the program is cancelled entirely.
In the past, the class has been composed of both heritage (international students from India) and non-heritage (american-born) students. There are usually only 1-2 students not of South Asian descent in each class. Students who speak Gujarati or Marathi at home are not considered heritage. A lot of the first semester is devoted to learning the script, which seems to be the big divide – the Indians already know how to read and write and the basic vocabulary, but the Americans start at square one. However, the native speakers usually have horrible spelling and grammar issues, which places everyone pretty much on the same level if you are trying to learn standard Hindi. From my vantage point, the real divide is psychological – the ABCD vs. FOB phenomenon that we have discussed to death here. 🙂 But at the most basic level, if any student taking the class actually puts effort into it, they will get something out of it.
The problem I see with Hindi, as well as other LCTLs that don’t get millions of dollars thrown at them, is that there are a lot of people who honestly believe that they can get around anywhere with just English. A member of our administration was known to say that they went to India once and never had to know any Hindi, so why was it important for our students to learn it? I went to a seminar in our nationally-recognized business school last year on outsourcing, and a question was brought up to the panel of CEOs and CFOs in attendance: “So in this age of international outsourcing, do you need to learn a foreign language?” The consensus answer was, “It would be nice, but you really don’t need to. Everyone will speak English for your benefit.” Sure, you can do business in India and never know a word of Hindi, as long as the people who take care of getting your food and washing your clothes speak English enough to talk to you. You can also stay in the confines of your five star hotel and corporate office park and eat at TGI Friday’s and feel like you’re in some exotic version of America, but you’d be missing out on so much. I believe LCTLs are going by the wayside because higher education has turned into a streamlined training ground to prepare students for the professional world, and liberal ideas such as opening your mind to new ideas, thinking in different ways, and experiencing different cultures are only secondary to the main objective.
I took two classes of introductory hindi at my large state university (though not one of those with South Asian Studies departments). It was grouped under the “near eastern languages and literatures” dept and our instructor was actually a grad student in german from india. Our class was composed of about 7 native Hindi students from India, 8 gujarati americans who knew their gujarati pretty well, 3 caucasians including a professor of sanskrit and a grad student in geography, and initially 7 Indian Americans whose parents’ language was not remotely or was very distantly similar to hindi (ie telugu, tamil, bengali). Needless to say, more than half the 7 Indo Ams who had little exposure to Hindi dropped the class in the first couple weeks as it became apparent that it would tilt toward people who had significant exposure (Indian Intl Students and Gujarati Americans). I was one of the two that stayed, and I have to say, it was terrible.
The instructor refused to separate the native speakers and more advanced Gujaratis from the class because of enrollment purposes: this was the first time Hindi had been taught at this university, and its chances to be taught in the future depended upon how many people signed up. After those of us who had no Hindi or North Indian background realized that the instructor wasn’t very good (though I will admit the text we used, Hindi for Non Hindi Speaking People, was), and subsequently refused to take any more offered Hindi classes, the students who thus far had done really well (all with significant prior exposure to Hindi) lobbied others like themselves to take the classes. I don’t know what happened.
What bothered me most about the class was the way it was paced: because most of the class was advanced, that’s the speed we went at. It took a superhuman effort by the few non-North Indian Americans to keep pace, especially since the script is so unfamiliar.
DesiDancer, thanks for the link. My strategic direction would be to tell Dr. Jayaraman to get a Flash intro for his site with that awesome anglicized hindi script and to move his office to the West Village. In addition to Amardeep’s suggestion, he should offer classes on all those yoga words so the hipsters can learn the Sanskrit for downward facing dog.
Amardeep,
I took three quarters of Hindi at Stanford last year. It was an excellent experience. The class was focused on conversational Hindi, so we didn’t have to learn any formal Hindi which is pretty much useless in day-to-day conversations. We watched a few films and did a lot of conversations and skits. I was surprised by how much I learned in 30 weeks.
Our class worked well because we had a great professor. She wrote her own textbook and workbooks and was always well prepared for class. I tried the Sunday school language thing when I was younger, but I didn’t learn anything because the instructor didn’t know the difference between teach and tell. There are also three different Hindi classes levels at Stanford: beginning, intermediate, and advanced, so none of the de facto segregation Manorama describes was needed.
Stanford also offers Tamil, Gujarati, and Sanskrit.
Vikram
Amardeep writes:
I don’t think so – high tech industries carry out conversations entirely in English.
People who want to do business with India generally prefer English-speaking Indians, but if you want to go to India, you still need to be able to talk to people on the street.
Then, courses in Kannad, Tamil and Telugu should be made popular, since the IT/BPO/BioTech boom is concentrated in the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. The Hindi speaking belt is largely a hi-tech free region, except maybe Delhi and its surroundings(less than 5% of revenues in this space).
M. Nam
Not according to Nicholas Ostler, in his book Empire of the Word he says that more people will be learning Mandarin and Hindi in coming years. I saw his book promotion on C-Span’s Book TV. That event can be seen at C-Span’s website also. Go to Book TV and look for Ostler.
Hindi is dying anyway.
Not according to Nicholas Ostler, in his book Empire of the Word he says that more people will be learning Mandarin and Hindi in coming years. I saw his book promotion on C-Span’s Book TV. That event can be seen at C-Span’s website also. Go to Book TV and look for Ostler.
I was more referring to the substitution of English words for Hindi ones.
More information on Ostler’s basis for those comments would be interesting. I hope it is deeper than “India and China’s economies are growing” (this might be more relevant in China where the need to learn Mandarin is higher).
This also brings up the point of how you actually count a “Hindi speaker.” I feel like the line is potentially more vague with Hindi than most other languages.
If anyone is interested, here is the website for the South Asian Language Studies Dept. at my school, UT Austin, which actually has quite a bit of a curriculum in South Asian languages, including a language I don’t find too often taught really anywhere outside of it’s home base, Malayalam.
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/cola/advising.cfm?unitkey=malayalam
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/cola/advising.cfm?unitkey=hindi
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/cola/advising.cfm?unitkey=sanskrit
On a side note. I feel that there is this feeling in lot of Indians that IT/computer can only be used with English language. As a result there is no Keyboard in Indian language. Lack of creativity is to blame. Consequence is that China had more than Billion US $ worth of e-commerce last year and India had less than 10 million $.
You guys are kinda getting me hyped. I used to know hindhi well, but like a well atrophied leg it has decayed and rotten for quite some time. Maybe i should get up on one of these nyc jumpoffs.
On a intersting side note, my sister who rocks a pretty bad ass sanskrit prayer tatood to her back, was once approached by some old white guy who was able to read it. He apparently sends his daughter to study sanskrit in some school in the city since she was young. Maybe i should on that instead. whose with me ?
RC, There do exist Indian language keyboards, e.g., Tamil. I think the situation in India, with its 15 constitutional languages, is different from China.
I also agree with Moor Nam. Most IT companies are in southern India. And techies use English.
If you think it is only Americans who expect everybody else to speak their language, consider this: A common complaint of northern Indians coming over to (Tamil-speaking) Madras is that people don’t speak Hindi.
My best friend is an at-home Farsi speaker, and when she observed an introductory Farsi class at her university that had separated heritage students and non-heritage students, she commented that the non-heritage students learned much more slowly without exposure to native speakers.
After first-semester Hindi, the “heritage” and “non-heritage” classes were combined, and although us non-heritage students had to struggle to keep up, we also heard a lot more Hindi and got to combine our various areas of expertise.
I also don’t recall any resentment toward the other group – it was a Marathi-speaking friend of mine who walked around the East Village with me teaching me how to do dental consonants by pretending to spit on the sidewalk.
The biggest problem we had was that a number of students who were Hindi-speakers or spoke similar languages well were taking the course for an easy A, so they slacked off, and those of us who spoke no Hindi seemed to be working harder in comparison.
Also, regarding what can be done to make the study of LCTLs more, well, common, there are things like the National Security Education Program scholarships, where students who go abroad to learn a LCTL can get a fair amount of money for the government, provided they then work for the govt for the length of time that they studied abroad. My Hindi teacher also proposed that those of us in a non-Western language class should receive six credits instead of the usual four that we would get for, say, intro to Italian.
There should be more scholarships, though! I’m planning on studying abroad in Jaipur come spring, and there’s very few scholarships for those of us who want to learn an Indian language. There’s the Freeman-ASIA program, but that doesn’t extend to South Asia, as it were. There’s a lot of scholarships to learn Japanese and German and goodness knows what else, but hardly anything for Hindi. And by hardly anything, I really mean “nothing.” (Except NSEP, but I can’t apply for that.)
I have a student (non-Indian) who has a devanagari tattoo just above her tailbone. She saw it all over the place, on a visit to India, and got the tattoo while she was there.
It’s the same thing as is written on all the trucks. (no, not “use dipper at night”) and the desi students who can read it always snicker.
जै मट डी
Ok, this is a separate issue, but what if Indian techies felt free to think, code, and communicate in their respective mother tongues?
I’m not trying to put down the mastery of English evinced by Indian software people (my wife is a software engineer who was raised in India, after all). What I’m thinking is that India’s high tech innovation could proceed even faster if ways were found to nurture it in the language people ordinarily speak.
Moreover, one of the biggest bottlenecks to India’s growth as a high tech power is the limited number of people who are educated in adequate English.
Again, I’m aware this is a different issue from the one I raised in the post. And I know that the reality is that software people today do all their business in English — I’m just speculating here.
But imagine the potential for growth if the language bottleneck were somehow removed…
I just wanted to clarify that the institution where I do my graduate work, and the institution which has the heritage/non-heritage division, is not the same institution I am studying Hindi at now. I am doing intensive language study for the summer at one of the places Amardeep mentions (I suppose it’s obvious what school that would be). The situation I describe in my post occurred where there is no heritage/non-heritage distinction–but since students come here from different universities, people had different experiences with first year Hindi, and it all stemmed from that.
Manorama,
Aha. I’d forgotten about that. Well, here’s to hoping someone at that particular midwestern institution is reading and paying attention.
And to everyone who thinks that Hindi is dying, I offer this witty song about commuting in Mumbai during the flooding:
Hey Mumbai tere bandhe hum, Yeh kaise kyun hum-par situm, Na railways chale, na BEST chale, Paidal chalte huwe nikle dum. Hey Mumbai——————
Waise office-se jaldi nikle hum, Jamke station-thak badhaaye kadam, Hum khade the magar, gaadi ki na khabar, Toota ummeed-ka papaddum. Aake baahar jab pheri nazar, Dekha Bambai bana tha gutter, Na auto chale aur na taxi rukhe, Ab kaise karenge safar. Hey Mumbai——————
Hua baarishse yun saamna, Na kahin bijali, koi phone na, MTNL kho gaya, Ambani bhi so gaya, Andheremein hamein chhod diya, Cell-phone bhi kare gadbadam, Yeh kaisa bada sankatam, Bhejemein fikr aur kuch na clear, Bheegke tan man hua bahut naram. Hey Mumbai——————
My favorite couplet is “MTNL kho gaya, Ambani bhi so gaya/Andhere mein hamein chhod diya”
BTW, there are some more verses to the song.
Srikanth, That was a nice link. I think to improve quality and have more widespread use, the government should give money to universities to do research on this. Commerce is language agnostic. If e-commerce sites are available in multiple languages it will definately improve reach. Reach is what businesses need to be successful.
Amardeep,
I think right now India’s cant dream of matching China due to, what you mentioned here. The math doesnt work. China has 1.3 billion people and India 1 billion but in India we are willingly dismissing at least 70% of that billion. So effectively we are only a nation of 300 million , from whom those who are good at Mathametics/Science will be good in IT related field. Where as China has almost all of that 1.3 billion to chose people who are good in Mathematics/Science.
Bottomline, numbers dont work for India as long as English is hinderence.
Amardeep, that was an amusing poem up there. I think the reason formal hindi is not functional today is partly because of ‘bollywood’. Typically you find punjabi words substituted for hindi and likewise for pronounciations. I have nothing against punjabi, but it doesn’t do justice to either one of the languages.
The decline in the use of proper hindi ( with mumbai hindi becoming more popular and being a native of UP, I cringe at it. sorry mumbaites ) has also resulted in the lack of hindi literature that is at par with the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Elliot of today. But this again is a discussion apart and as someone else above noted ( too lazy to scroll back to check), people in India itself cannot converse in proper hindi ( and I don’t mean formal hindi). Simple day to day words like pareshaani are being replaced by tension. Ekta Kapoor serials, that I love to hate, reflect this trend ( or are these soaps the reason english is being used in hindi?). However, I do believe there is a significant difference in usage of hindi in UP, Uttaranchal and Bihar, which makes sense since Hindi is native to these parts ( not exclusively of course) So, really I think hindi usage is more problematic in metros like delhi and mumbai. I do not know if this trend is apparent in other south asian languages. Anyone has an opinion on this?
DD, Any chance of a tattoo translation for us non-Hindi speakers?
ads- sorry, how rude of me!
it says Jai Mata Di, which as I understand it (ABCD disclaimer) means Victory to the Mother Deity, or Victory to Durga Ma…
My point about the student was simply that she had zero idea what it said. It could say anything and she’d never know better. I think the fact that it’s near her butt is half of the joke.
Though I would favor a dorsal cleavage tattoo that said “use dipper at night” 😉
I think the fact that it’s near her butt is half of the joke.
Heh. Nice play on words, DD.
Actually the ones around here are usually held at public high schools (courses themselves are privately funded) on weekends or in the evenings.
As for standards they basically count as a language credit in high school the same as taking any third language course besides English or French.
Also I have never heard of courses for Hindi being offered in Toronto its mainly either Gujarati, Punjabi or Tamil.
It should read जै माता दी, I believe.
Or a ventral one saying ‘Horn Please OK’ 😉
DesiDancer, I took a class at the Indian Consulate too…I wonder if we were in the same class. I agree, the teacher was good, really helpful. I freaked out about halfway into the semester because I felt like I was forgetting my Sinhalese with each newly memorized Hindi word, though. I can still read write and speak Sinhalese, and with so few Sinhala speakers around, I need to make sure it doesn’t atrophy more than it has already.
The teacher at the consulate was a wonderfully thoughtful and erudite man…very careful not to upset his Hindu and Muslim students, or get drawn into arguments about religion 🙂
His interest in linguistics led to some fascinating digressions – how Hindi has changed formed over the years, the Persian and Urdu influences, and even how Sri Lankan Tamil differs from South Indian Tamil. Apparently the latter has cross-pollinated with Hindi and other southern Indian languages over the years, while the Sri Lankan form stayed true to its historical antecedents. Who knew?
Just curious: how do other Sepia readers feel about people who get some Sanskrit tattoo because it “looks cool’? Is this the same, or different, from people who get a chinese character that means something “significant” (i.e. banal, like, “life”) tattooed?
just to point out some inconsistency on the other side of the desk…
when i was at columbia my hindi teacher (who was white, helped to write “Teach Yourself Hindi,” and is apparently an amazing Urdu scholar) told our class that what she loved about indians was our “Cafe Au Lait Skin Color”
i’m not sure how that story fits into the discussion but it’s one of my favorites from college mostly b/c my friend Nisha and I sat there trying to figure out if we heard her right…
and i totally was the kid in hindi class who wasn’t there for an easy A and nor was i super academic…
i just wanted to talk to my Nani so she wouldn’t look at me oddly anymore.
it worked!
Hain? Maybe we need this class? I always thought it was “Raatin tu daaru peeke”
Halwa Puri heads off to gurdwara to sign up for Punjabi School
Sailgurl,
I believe I know who you’re talking about, and yes, she is an amazing Urdu scholar — pretty much universally respected by Desis who are into Ghazals for her research and translations.
But I’m surprised and disappointed to hear she would say something so silly.
Still, she is one of those people who has committed her life to the subject, and I respect her.
Or probably जय माता दी?
I learnt Hindi as a second language at school in India and am not a native speaker of Hindi. Though my Hindi learning went off quite well, I always had trouble with the gender of nouns. किताब I think is feminine, while पुस्तक is masculine. Or am I wrong?
I wonder if there is rule of thumb to identify the gender of Hindi nouns.
You are right, as usual 🙂
Re: South Asian Heritage vs South Asian non-heritage
There are apparently 330 thousand people who speak hindi at home* according to the last US census. And it is the largest single group amongst South Asian language speakers.
And that 330k does not include Urdu-speakers, Punjabis, Gujarati, Bengalis and etc. There is a theory that people tend to overestimate their own numbers if they are a minority ; and that the majority usually underestimates itself. Based personal experience I would have thought that there are more Gujaratis and Punjabis — but apparently not.
Perhaps my number crunching is a bit off, the total number of Asian Indians is around 1.5 million. But when I add up all the speakers of Indian languages I get something like 1.2 million. So there are about 300,000 people who identify themselves as Asian Indian, but do not report speaking any Indian language. This could be the GEN2s who do not speak some or any Indian language. Not sure.
The number of Urdu-speakers and other Pakistani languages nearly matches the number of people who identify themselves as being of Pakistani origin. About 250K. That is if you discount Urdu speakers from India.
Btw, the Census groups Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam as an “Asian and Pacific Islander” language. The bar graph representing the categories of languages spoken in America is linguistically accurate, but does not tell the “full” story.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/lang_use.html
*Language Spoken at Home Data on language spoken at home were derived from answers to long-form questionnaire Items11a and 11b, which were asked of a sample of the population. Data were edited to include in tabulations only the population 5 years old and over. Questions 11a and 11b referred to languages spoken at home in an effort to measure the current use of languages other than English. People who knew languages other than English but did not use them at home or who only used them elsewhere were excluded. Most people who reported speaking a language other than English at home also speak English. The questions did not permit determination of the primary or dominant language of people who spoke both English and another language. Instructions to enumerators and questionnaire assistance center staff stated that a respondent should mark ‘‘Yes’’ in Question 11a if the person sometimes or always spoke a language other than English at home. Also, respondents were instructed not to mark ‘‘Yes’’ if a language other than English was spoken only at school or work, or if speaking another language was limited to a few expressions or slang of the other language. For Question 11b, respondents were instructed to print the name of the non-English language spoken at home. If the person spoke more than one language other than English, the person was to report the language spoken more often or the language learned first.
For people who indicated that they spoke a language other than English at home in Question 11a, but failed to specify the name of the language in Question 11b, the language was assigned based on the language of other speakers in the household,
Separation of the class into two groups — native language speakers and non-native language speakers — is common in Spanish instruction, for example. It makes sense from a functional standpoint. One group needs fewer pronunciation drills (although with Hindi, they probably need some) but more grammar …
Why would I want to learn Hindi or Urdu?
Just a question.
Anyway, when I was at school about 6 years ago, the kids had to do all the work to try and get a Hindi class in, had to put up with administrators that said they were only doing it for an Easy A, went through the alumni roles to look for South Asian names that might be willing to donate the money for the program, etc. This is at a multi-billion dollar endowment!!! The school had one permanent South Asian history class at the time (as far as I remember).
Now, the school in question has done something of an aboutface and likes to pride itself as a “global institution.”
If there’s a target for middle class desis take out their anger for invisibility, higher ed institutions seem like a good target.
A Comment Here the UK Hindi, Urdu Bengali and even Punjabi (eternal lingistic underdog) are offered as subjects at High School Level.
How great is the difference between Hindi and Hindistani ?
I always had trouble with the gender of nouns. किताब
Kitab is not a Hindi word. Its an urdu word and it comes from Arabic. In Arabic a book is called Kitab as well. I believe the Hindi word for Kitab is Pustak.
The decline in the use of proper hindi ( with mumbai hindi becoming more popular and being a native of UP, I cringe at it. sorry mumbaites )
What would be the examples for Mumbai Hindi ?
I know of Hindi being taught in a few Brampton public schools ( on saturday/sunday) .
The Hindi-Arabic connection is also handy if you visit Turkey (where, of course, they speak Turkish):
Kitap: book Dünya: world Kofte: kofta Gül: rose Sabah: morning Maydani: square Kismet: fate Hava: air Şair Baba: poet-father
Su means water in Turkish; in Hindi, ‘su-su’ means ‘wee-wee.’ So if you buy too much su, you make su-su 😉
al Mujahid: yes the hindi word for kitab is pustak. Narncruiser: I have no clue what hindistani refers to. Hindustani is a term though and if you’ve heard it with reference to music, then its the North-Indian classical music division with Carnatic classical music being the other division, from the South.
Al Mujahid: Mumbai hindi tends to use a lot of slang like raapchik, mast, maal, jhakkas and waart.For some odd reason they substitute maangta hai for chahiye ( want)and there are other such substitutions as well. It also tends to be awkward with the grammar.You would have heard these terms if you have seen any typical ‘masala’ Indian movies. I hope that helped
there really is no system for masculine/feminine nouns. it’s just something you retain with usage.
unfortunately I forget it all and just conjugate everything feminine.