Hindi Voice Over Agency

Everything you never needed to know about speaking Hindi

India doesn’t just have one language
India has 23 national languages although the majority of Indians are Hindi speakers, you’ll also hear Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati.

Checkmate
The game of chess as we know it originated in India. It was first played in about the 6th century CE and it spread from Asia to the Europe and the Middle East. Did you know it is considered rude to say checkmate if you are playing chess? Your opponent will know when their King has been ‘mated’ you don’t need to tell them. Instead, you should thank them for the game.

Star struck Indians
Bollywood produces between 1,00 and 2,000 films each year. By comparison Hollywood produces between 200 and 300. India’s biggest movie producer is based in Mumbai and films from here are in the Hindi language.

Working on the railroad
India has a vast railroad system which takes around 23 million passengers a day, some even ride on the roof! The railway is India’s largest employer with around 1.4 million people working in the railway system. By comparison British railways employ around 115,000 people and China employs around 294,013.

Lunchtime deliveries
It’s normal in India to have your lunch prepared at home and then delivered to your place of work. The delivery people are called Dabbawallahs and they use bikes and trains to get the hot food out to the Indian workers. It’s an efficient system which makes sure every person gets the correct tiffin box which are then returned home by the Dabbawallahs after lunch.

A nice cup of tea
Tea has been grown in India for centuries, but did you know that apparently the Indian people would serve tea as a meal cooked with oil and garlic. That makes a change from a cuppa.

Wet, Wet, Wet
The wettest place in the world is in the state of Meghalaya in northeast India. It has a rainfall average of 470 inches a year or 12,000 mm. In the UK we get between 800mm to 1,400 mm, so maybe Great Britain isn’t as rainy as we think!

Going solo
More than 225 million years ago India was an Island situated off the coast of Australia. But around 200 million years ago the Indian landmass moved towards and collided with Asia which then created the Himalayas.

5,4,3,2,1
In 1963 India made its first foray into space exploration. A scientist by the name of Vikram Sarabhai had a rocket built in the village of Thumba, Kerala. All the villagers had to be rehoused in a new village and the church became a workshop. When the rocket was built, it was delivered to the launch site by bicycle. At 6.25 pm the rocket was launched into the atmosphere and the Indian people had taken their first steps into space exploration.

Cow Identity
In Bengal all cows have an official identity card. Each cow has a unique number. Every year the government carry out a cow census to find out the number of cows in Bengal. In 2019 the census showed that livestock numbers had increased in Bengal by around 15%.

A short history on the Hindi language

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

Modern Standard Hindi is the standardised version of the Hindustani language used in India – Modern Standard Urdu is the standardised version of Hindustani used in Pakistan. Hindi and Urdu were created when India and Pakistan became separate nations, but the spoken versions of the two languages are essentially Hindustani and remain almost indistinguishable.

Hindustani originally derives from Sanskrit, but its main developmental period was during the Mughul Empire (1526-1857), when it came under the influence of the official Persian court language. The prevailing dialect from this time was Khari Boli, used in and around Delhi, the Empire’s capital.

Modern Hindustani (based on Khari Boli) was made an official language of India by the British Raj in 1837, along with English – replacing Persian.

Which countries have Hindi as a national language?

Hindi is by far the most widely spoken of India’s 22 official languages, spoken by 41% of the population.

How many people speak Hindi as their first language?

In India, over 400 million people speak Hindi as their first language, and over 100 million speak it as a second language.

There are large Hindi-speaking communities in many other countries, including South Africa, Nepal, Bangladesh and Uganda.

Did you know…

• The literary versions of Hindi and Urdu are more different than the spoken ones. Hindi uses the Devnagari script derived from Sanskrit and retains many Sanskrit words, while Urdu is written with a Persian script and has adopted much Persian vocabulary.
• Most Indian states use three languages for their official documents – English, Hindi and the primary official language of that state (if it’s not English or Hindi).
• Hindi dialects vary greatly. The most easterly regional language, Maithili, is more similar to Bengali than standard Hindi, while the most westerly, Rajasthani, resembles Gujarati. However, most speakers of these regional languages would refer to them as Hindi dialects rather than separate languages.
• Because Hindi was chosen as the language of education in India, it remains a language of upward social mobility (along with English), and is the preferred method of communication when looking for new jobs, marriages etc.

The Indian economy

India’s economy is the tenth largest in the world by nominal GDP and the third largest by PPP. India is the 19th largest exporter and the 10th largest importer in the world.

Due to its large population there is still a lot of poverty in the country, despite its economic success. Although India has a growing high-tech sector, around half of the population is employed in agriculture (plus forestry, logging and fishing).

Around 22% of the population work in industry (which accounts for 26% of the GDP), and 27% in the service sector. Over 20 million people work in textile manufacturing.

India was one of the founding members of the World Trade Organisation’s precursor, and is a member of the G20 and BRICS (the association of five major emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).