I am fighting a battle for Hindi and the reason I am doing it is because of what I have seen living in US for 15 years. There is this deliberate effort to weaken native languages by dismantling them into it in a dialect, by pushing dialects so that they go for their own separate linguistic status and then weaken the native language. The way it affects Hindi is if Hindi is broken apart into its dialects, the number of native Hindi speakers will significantly go down and then, Hindi would not be able to make a claim to become an official language in The United Nations.
If I can borrow a metaphor, Hindi language is like Durga, which, if you recall a story, got its weapons from one god, got its powers from a different god, same way Hindi got its powers from it’s dialects. Now if Hindi is broken into its dialects, and those dialects are included in the eighth schedule of the Constitution, the number of Hindi speaking people would significantly go down. And as the numbers go down, Hindi would lose its political power and its claim to be used on the international forums. One forum that I can immediately think of is World Economic Forum, whose power language index has only one Indian language and that is Hindi. So yes, I do think that there is a deliberate effort to weaken Hindi, so that it can be kicked out of international forums.
Since I started this online petition supporting that the status of the eighth schedule of the Constitution be kept as it is to maintain the status-quo, I have received quite a lot of support from the people. They have called me up on phone, sent me messages on Whatsapp, they have talked to me and had the passionate discussions on Facebook and as of now about 350 to 400 people have signed this petition. And this movement, this struggle is definitely gaining momentum as the day progresses.
The reason Hindi hasn’t gotten the status of a national language is mainly political one and the second half of this answer is that we the people who speak Hindi are not as faithful to our language as other people in the rest of the world are. To give you an example, if you go to the France, people insist that even if you are a tourist, you speak French. If you are asking directions for Eiffel Tower or Louvre Museum, French people would insist that you would speak in their language. So the amount of faith, the way rest of the world is faithful to their languages, we Hindi speakers are lacking that quite a bit.
I don’t agree with this claim that Hindi is beating Mandarin and the statistics, which were quoted by one particular news report, are false. The sources can not be independently verified. The logical structures, the way those arguments are put, they more amount to an opinion rather than based on actual verifiable facts.
I think the best way to spread Hindi, is actually to use it. That’s how any language propagate. I think it is our inherent laziness that we mix two different languages when we unknowingly insert words of a different language, when there is an actual, simple Hindi word available for that particular thing. We must show some faith towards the capabilities of our own language.
