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India has always been a linguistic hothouse. This has been accentuated by generational divides where parents and children speak different languages.

Urbanisation has taken people away from their roots, language included.

Leaving the shores for jobs and education has made its own contribution.

I know of a diplomat from Singapore who speaks in Bhojpuri (a dielect of Hindi) with his parents, migrants from India; and English with his children.

This is the trend in much of urban South Asia, where education has divided families, making them more cosmopolitan in the process.

I found some interesting reports recently, coming from different corners of the world, about how Indians communicate.

In Toronto, a Hindi language instructor has begun a language-and-culture course to meet the growing desire of Indo-Canadian children to speak to grandparents and relatives in India who cannot speak English.

“Grandparents help kids stay in touch with their roots,” says Nisha Taneja, whose two daughters have been learning Hindi for two years.

Punjabi and Bengali classes are also being offered in Hamilton, which has 24,000 South Asians, The Hamilton Spectator reports.

The third report, from Sydney, says a Hindi language course offered by the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) is popular among Australian students.

Introduced last year and run by Philip Claxton, it is a thriving component of CCE’s languages unit. “Bollywood is responsible for the interest in Hindi,” Claxton says.

“Studying Hindi is all about crossing cultures and improving my own higher-order thinking,” says Howard Shibuya, a Hindi student.

Surprisingly, the target audience for Hindi is not the traditional India-bound entrepreneur.

Claxton says: “These are people ranging from heritage students who have an Indian background to those whose partners, fiances, spouses speak either Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi, to those who have an interest in religious traditions.”

A professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario says: “The first generation is busy adjusting to a new place, the second generation gets interested in identity.”

Obviously getting back to your mother tongue or Hindi can be useful in many ways. So learn Hindi.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 7:45 am and is filed under Hindi Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.