Language (status) Planning in India

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The future of Hindi and English

Adding up the pluses and minuses, theorists conclude that English is the best choice as an L2 for Hindi speakers. But unless you consider global motivations for learning English, Hindi is the best choice as an L2 for non-Hindi speakers in India. Not all India-watchers would agree; they think English is the best choice even for non-Hindus. Certainly, Hindi is robust: There has been a proliferation of Hindi news channels on television and films in Hindi from Bollywood are very successful. Further, Hindi is a language with a rich literature and more than 300 million speakers in the 1991 census. But this number is accurate only if you lump together many “dialects” that would also like to claim “language” status.

In 1997, a poll reported that 71% of respondents said they “understood” Hindi and 31% said the same for English. But about 40% of all Indians are Hindi L1 speakers, so this means another 31% must have learned Hindi later. It can therefore be concluded that clearly, as second languages, Hindi and English are now on a par. Furthermore, students learning English make it surging ahead as a favored L2.

India has a policy to promote multilingualism through what is called the “three-language formula”. Everyone is supposed to learn Hindi, their own language, and English. For Hindi speakers, this means Hindi, another Indian language, and English. But, not everyone cooperates; Hindi speakers tend not to learn a third language at all (except possibly Sanskrit, which is not a spoken language) and non-Hindi L1 speakers from the larger Dravidian groups tend to learn no Hindi. There is a lot of mutual passive bilingualism. For example, Hindi speakers come to South India and speak Hindi and they’re answered in English; Tamils learn enough Hindi to understand Bollywood movies.

Thus, India remains a nation where the people resist state-supported language planning, and seem to be the victors. There is a Department of Official Language in the Ministry of Home Affairs. Its purpose was to help Hindi replace English, insisting that Hindi is the language of “the real India”. But the overall official stance on language is ambiguous at best. Non-Hindi states successfully follow the option of their state language with English as an L2. Still, one can argue that the future of Hindi is good, but not as the main official language.