You might already be familiar with some Hindi words. For instance, here are some English words that come from Hindi:
English and Hindi are part of the same broad language family (the Indo-European languages) —but they are on different branches within that family: the Germanic branch for English and the Indo-Aryan branch for Hindi.
| Language | Main Language Family | Branch |
|---|---|---|
| English | Indo-European | Germanic |
| Spanish | Indo-European | Romance |
| Hindi | Indo-European | Indo-Aryan |
| Bengali | Indo-European | Indo-Aryan |
| Portuguese | Indo-European | Romance |
| Russian | Indo-European | Slavic |
| French | Indo-European | Romance |
| German | Indo-European | Germanic |
| Tamil | Dravidian | South Dravidian |
| Hungarian | Uralic | Ugric |
If you compare the Hindi greeting नमस्ते (namaste) with the corresponding English greeting “hello”, you immediately notice that Hindi and English use different writing systems.
Most Hindi vocabulary words are very different from their English equivalents.
| English | French | Spanish | Hindi |
|---|---|---|---|
| solution | solution | solución | समाधान (samādhān) |
| situation | situation | situación | परिस्थिति (paristhiti) |
| history | histoire | historia | इतिहास (itihās) |
| family | famille | familia | परिवार (parivār) |
| image | image | imagen | छवि (chavi) |
| activity | activité | actividad | गतिविधि (gatividhi) |
| music | musique | música | संगीत (saṅgīt) |
| idea | idée | idea | विचार (vicār) |
| origin | origine | origen | मूल (mūl) |
| strategy | stratégie | estrategia | रणनीति (raṇnīti) |
In terms of vocabulary, learning Hindi is much more difficult than learning Spanish or French. That’s partly because English has plenty of Latin-based words. French and Spanish do as well.
Hindi, however, has hardly any words that come from Latin. Many Hindi words come from a different ancient language: Sanskrit.
In most cases, Hindi vocabulary words do not resemble their English translations. But in some cases, they do. In this section, we shall see some examples of these.
Two main types of similar vocabulary words are cognates (terms passed down from the common ancestor language) and loanwords (terms borrowed from the other language).
In the table below, we have listed some Hindi-English cognates.
| English | Hindi |
|---|---|
| mother | माता (mātā) |
| brother | भ्राता (bhrātā) |
| name | नाम (nām) |
| new | नया (nayā) |
| sun | सूरज (sūraj) |
| serpent | सर्प (sarp) |
| mind | मन (man) |
| three | तीन (tīn) |
| eight | आठ (āṭh) |
| nine | नौ (nau) |
When languages come into contact, they frequently borrow words from each other, particularly when a new concept lacks a term in one language.
English and Hindi have had a long history of close contact. A significant period of contact occurred during the British colonial rule in India (from 1858 to 1947) when English served as the language of the government.
After India gained its independence, Hindi and English became the languages of the Indian government.
English has borrowed words from Hindi, especially in fields like spirituality and cuisine. Examples of words that English borrowed from Hindi are provided in the table below.
| English Word | Hindi Word |
|---|---|
| guru | गुरु |
| chai | चाय |
| bungalow | बंगला |
| shampoo | चाँपना |
Hindi has incorporated loanwords from English, especially in areas like technology and administration.
| English | Hindi |
|---|---|
| Computer | कंप्यूटर (kampyūṭar) |
| Telephone | टेलीफ़ोन (ṭelīfon) |
| Internet | इंटरनेट (iṇṭarneṭ) |
The most immediately apparent difference between English and Hindi is the difference in writing systems. The Devanagari script used for Hindi is recognizable by its horizontal line, which connects the top of adjacent characters in a word.
Hindi is not the only language that uses the Devanagari script. Other languages that use it include Nepali (the official language of Nepal) as well as Marathi, a language spoken in India.
In fact, the Devanagari script is the fourth most widely used writing system in the world, after the Latin script, Chinese characters, and the Arabic script.
The alphabet that we use for English is a form of the Latin script, which is also known as the Roman script because it originated in Ancient Rome. The English alphabet has 26 letters, whereas the Devanagari script has almost twice as many characters.
Unlike English, which distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase letters, the Devanagari script used for Hindi does not have a distinction between lowercase and capital letters.
Romanization refers to the transliteration (or conversion) of a text from a language that doesn't use the Latin script (like Hindi, Japanese, or Korean) into the Latin alphabet. That allows English speakers who haven't yet learned the Devanagari script to read Hindi words.
The Devanagari script used for Hindi has many more letters than the Latin alphabet. As a result, the Latin alphabet alone cannot cover the entire phonetic range of Hindi.
To accurately represent these sounds using the Latin alphabet, additional diacritical marks are used to distinguish the different Hindi letters. Here are some examples:
| Devanagari | Transliteration |
|---|---|
| न | na |
| ङ | ṅa |
| ञ | ña |
| ण | ṇa |
| Devanagari | Transliteration |
|---|---|
| द | da |
| ड | ḍa |
| ढ | ḍha |
| ध | dha |
In English, individual consonants and vowels are represented by separate letters, and they are combined to form syllables. The Hindi language works differently: consonants have an inherent vowel which by default is a short “a” sound.
Diacritics (additional marks) are added to the consonant symbol to change the inherent vowel.
| Devanagari | Transliteration |
|---|---|
| क | ka |
| का | kā |
| कि | ki |
| की | kī |
| कु | ku |
| कू | kū |
| के | ke |
| कै | kai |
| को | ko |
| कौ | kau |
Hindi also has standalone vowel symbols for when a word starts with a vowel sound. For example, the Hindi word “अहिंसा” (ahinsā), which means “nonviolence,” begins with the character 'अ' (the short 'a' vowel symbol).
After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, Old Norman—a dialect of French—became the language of the Anglo-Norman government in England. This lasted for several centuries and led to an influx of French words into the English language.
As a Germanic language, English does not descend from Latin. And yet, it has been estimated that 69% of the words in an English dictionary come from Latin or Greek [1].
The reason is that many of the French words that entered the English language came from Latin—because French is a Romance language that evolved from Latin.
Those who travel to India sometimes visit the Taj Mahal (in Agra) or the Red Fort (in Delhi). Both were built during the period of the Mughal Empire.
The Mughals (who came from Central Asia) controlled the Indian subcontinent from the 16th to the 19th.
They spoke Persian, which became the language of the administration during the time of the Mughal Empire.
During that period, many Persian loanwords entered the Hindi language.
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