Hindi Is The Largest Spoken Language In The World

Hindi Is The Largest Spoken Language In The World 

Professor Ram Lakhan Meena, School of Humanities and Languages, Central University of Rajasthan

There are approximately 6900 languages currently spoken around the world, the majority of which have only a small number of speakers. About 4 billion of the earth's 6.5 billion people, or over 60% of the earth's population, speak one of the following 30 languages as their native tongue. Languages are ordered in the table below by numbers of native speakers. Numbers of second-language speakers are given where known. Second language speakers are those whose native language is typically a minority language of the country in which they live and who learn the second language because it is the official national language of the country where they reside. Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world in twentieth century . It is spoken by more than 800 million people all over the world. Hindi is the official and national language of India, the country with the second largest population in the world. The demand to speak Hindi has grown by 85% in last 15 years. Every year, Millions of tourist across the world visits India. The ability to speak & understand Hindi increase the opportunity of enjoying with  Indian culture, history and people. Hindi language skill makes their journey more easy and interesting.

 NRI (Non Resident Indian) who lives outside India for years and expect their next generation to understand about India, its language, culture, social systems and people etc. It helps to the people who want to open/start their business in India or having associations with indian companies. In science, business, commerce, information systems and digital media, India’s growth as a viable world economy has spurred investor interest in the region. Corporations looking to expand their operations and sales to the South Asian region will be recruiting people who are familiar with Hindi and the Indian culture to market their products to a Hindi-speaking population which is a very very big market and upcoming focused area for Corporates/MNCs.

 If you have interest in Hindi films, Hindi songs, Hindi literature etc. In terms of difficulty, it ranks as one of the easiest and most logical languages to read, write, and pronounce. Furthermore, Hindi speakers live all over the globe – in Germany, India, Mauritius, Nepal, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, the United States and Yemen, comprising 366 million speakers worldwide. In addition, Urdu – the official language of Pakistan – can be understood by speakers of Hindi, opening up yet another avenue of opportunity. Top 30 Languages by Number of Native Speakers; here is a chart showing the 12 most spoken languages in the world. Mandarin is number one, with twice as many speakers as Hindi, the number 2 language. Spanish is number 3, followed by English 4 as per records available in 2005. But in 2014 this number has changed as Hindi (Hindustani) has the largest number of speaker in the world because Urdu language had considered the one of the style of Hindustani (Hindi). 

1	Hindi	880	1,028M
2	Mandarin	863	1025M
3	Spanish	352	522 M
4	English	335	511 M
5	Bengali	200	247 M
6	Arabic	200	285 M
7	Portuguese	173	207 M
8	Russian	168	301 M
9	Japanese	125	176 M
10	German	99	166 M
11	French	75	197 M
12	Malay-Indonesian	57	196 M

The only language that had more speakers was Hindi with 551.4 million. This includes 422 million, who list it as the primary language, 98.2 million for whom it was a second language and 31.2 million who listed it as their third. English was the primary language for barely 2.3 lakh Indians at the time of the census, more than 86 million listed it as their second language and another 39 million as their third language. This puts the number of English speakers in India at the time to more than 125 million.

The rise of English puts Bengali, once India's second largest language in terms of primary speakers, in distant third place. Those who spoke Bengali as their first, second or third language add up to 91.1 million, far behind English. Telugu with 85 million speakers in all and Marathi with 84.2 million retain their position behind Bengali as does Tamil with 66.7 million and Urdu with 59 million.

Gujarati now falls behind Kannada though it has a sizeable number of primary speakers — 6.1 million — compared to Kannada's 37.9 million. Karnataka's linguistic diversity means that many list other languages as their first and Kannada as a second language. This adds 11.5 million to the ranks of Kannada speakers and another 1.4 million use it as a third language. In total, Kannada had 50.8 million speakers in 2001 compared to Gujarati's 50.3 million.

Oriya overtakes Malayalam thanks to the 3.3 million people who listed it as their second language and 3.2 lakh who said it was their third language. The total number of Oriya speakers was 36.6 million against 33.8 million who spoke Malayalam. Punjabi, with 31.4 million speakers, and Assamese with 18.9 million are among India's most spoken languages. Unfortunately, the census asked people to list a maximum of three languages, so it is not known how many speak more languages.

The data covers only those over five because the census assumed that younger children would only know their mother tongue. As expected, urban Indians are more likely to be multi-lingual but as many as 136.7 million rural Indians speak at least two languages.

The vast majority of Hindi speakers are in India, where it is the official language, and especially popular in northern and central India. The Indian census of 2011 puts the number of first-language speakers of Hindi at 551.4 million, although this is a broader definition of Hindi than is used elsewhere, and includes dialects that would be considered by many linguists to be distinct languages. The Indian figure, plus speakers numbering hundreds of thousands in South Africa, Fiji, the United States, Bangladesh, Yemen, Nepal and Malaysia, makes the world total around 680 million people, including speakers in at least 18 territories. This makes Hindi the second largest language by number of speakers, after Mandarin Chinese. Spoken Hindi is very similar to Urdu, such that speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another. However, influences of other languages in India and Pakistan, and socio-linguistic considerations, mean that they are usually considered as separate languages. Hindi borrows words from the Sanskrit language.