As an English as a New Language teacher, I always love learning about the languages and culture of my students. I have had several Indian students over the years who spoke Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu respectively. There are 22 "scheduled languages" of India, although Hindi and English are most commonly used for governmental and political communication. Each state of India can choose its official language. While many people speak English for everyday interactions, I am looking forward to learning a few helpful phrases. I'm sure my terrible pronunciation will be a great ice breaker!
Using the following links, you can listen to common Hindi phrases, see samples of the languages that abound in India and discover which location they are spoken.
(information in this post was excerpted from www.indiabook.com)
Stace... here's a comment. Now your posts are commented upon.
ReplyDeleteThanks for these interesting resources, Stacy. I found the variety of languages and scripts to be one of the most interesting elements of Indian society. I'm in Europe right now, and I try to imagine how the EU would function if every Member country Had a different writing system as well as a different spoken language.
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