Hindi is one of the official languages in India. Among these, the Hindi language is the primary language of the country. Hindi is spoken in many different countries around the world including Nepal, Mauritius, and parts of UK, USA, Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and many more. In fact, when you know how to speak Hindi, not only will you be able to communicate properly with India's population, you will also understand people from Pakistan since they speak the same tongue; although technically, Pakistan's national language is Urdu.

Indeed, Hindi is becoming a major language of the world. Now let us compare Hindi with the language found to be most useful across the globe: the English language. What are differences between the two languages that are worth noting?

Difference in Origin

The Hindi language could be traced back to the Khariboli dialect used in Delhi. It belongs to the Indo-European language family under the Western Hindi. English meanwhile is of the Germanic language family. Its roots could be traced to as far back as the year 400's from the tongues of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England. Though both Hindi and English are under the Indo-European language family, they have major differences.

Difference in Alphabet

The English language is written using the English alphabet consisting of 26 letters. Written Hindi employs the Devangari script which contains 10 vowels and 40 consonants. Bars on top of the symbols make them distinct. Since Hindi is a phonetic language, the word is pronounced according to its spelling. This makes the language easier to pronounce since it follows the written form all the time. This is unlike English where pronunciations of certain words do not strictly follow the written form.

Difference in Grammar

English and Hindi share the same verb tenses, i.e. simple present, past, future, and so on. In Hindi, however, there is a deficiency in associating them to properly convey different meanings. Thus, Hindi speakers often find themselves using present continuous instead of the simple present.

Hindi does not have the equivalent of "do". So instead of structuring the words to form queries, intonation is used to convey a question. Moreover, in conditional sentences, Hindi makes use of the future tense in the independent clause.

In English, polite requests are usually expressed in the form of questions. In Hindi, subjunctives are employed and the sentence structure changed to ask for something. While the English language has definite articles, Hindi does not. Moreover, the number "one" is used instead of the indefinite article.

In terms of sentence structure, the subject-object-verb is used in Hindi, whereas English uses the subject-verb-object word order. Prepositions in English come after the pronoun or noun they qualify. For Hindi, prepositions succeed the noun or pronouns. Hindi speakers typically have difficulty using the correct prepositions as is common to most non-native speakers learning English.

Difference in Vocabulary

Hindi has adapted many English words. The pronunciations of these incorporated words, though, have been modified.

Though differences between Hindi and English languages are clear, especially with the Devangari script it uses, Hindi is not too hard to master.

I am a language teacher living in Asia. I have over a decade of experience teaching all ages a variety of subjects. For free Hindi info and lessons, please visit my blog here.

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