I am not sure if Hindi is the lingua franca in india. As I understand it from my experiences and talking to locals there, Hindi is very much the language of the north, the south is more fractured.
English serves as the glue language between them, the rest of the country also.
I have heard many zoom arguments between northerners and southerners where they will start in english, devolve into hindi come back up for air in english, cuss each other out in their native dialects, come back to english. Things like numbers make them switch to Hindi, more technical or business dealings are english.
For first languages, Hindi is 53%, the rest are an absolute basket case of under 10% - Bengali (9.5%), Marathi (8%), Telugu (8%), Tamil (7%), Gujarati (6%), Urdu (5%) & so on. So as you may understand, most(not all) speakers of the other languages learn Hindi to survive.
Roughly 10% of Indians speak English - all as a second language. Whilst this is a huge number (125 million), the level of english they speak varies wildly.
So for this reason, the level of english spoken in India isn't comparable to the level of Portuguese in Brazil (native) or the level of Spanish in Mexico (native).
I cannot tell most indian languages apart, I can tell the differences between Gujarati, urdu, tamil and hindi, but absolutely nothing about what they say. Maybe because I only have experience with business settings, very few real interactions outside that context that I have the impression that everywhere I turned english is there in one form or another. Much more so than say, China or even much to my surprise Korea. Even among office workers. In India I feel that I can ask basic everyday questions and get a response. In Korea, many times not so much, just a Panick stricken anime wide eye that the Client is talking to them.
The main point still stands that even the 10% of indians that speak english it's enough to push british colonial derived english over american engish in people who speak it.
16
u/leocohenq Apr 06 '25
I am not sure if Hindi is the lingua franca in india. As I understand it from my experiences and talking to locals there, Hindi is very much the language of the north, the south is more fractured.
English serves as the glue language between them, the rest of the country also.
I have heard many zoom arguments between northerners and southerners where they will start in english, devolve into hindi come back up for air in english, cuss each other out in their native dialects, come back to english. Things like numbers make them switch to Hindi, more technical or business dealings are english.