Hyderabad: The World Economic Forum has put Hindi in the fifth slot as the most spoken language in the world with around 260 million speakers globally.
Hindi, however, has always been there on the list among most spoken languages like Spanish, Chinese and English. The surprise element ‘Bengali’, which is India’s vernacular language, meanwhile, has climbed to the sixth most spoken top language globally, with 242 million official speakers.
Hindi, which was the fourth most spoken on the chart in 2016 and 3rd in 2013, slipped to the fifth position in 2017, while Arabic took a lead over Hindi in the listing.
Chinese, with 1,284 million speakers leads the way and is the most spoken in the world followed by Spanish with 437 million speakers.
The survey commissioned by Ethnologue (Source of Information on World’s Languages) shows that more people are estimated to speak Chinese than Spanish, English and Arabic combined. English, however, remains the official language across 106 countries.
Indians whose mother tongue is Hindi and Bengali are part of a big club.
Arvind Chatterjee explained, “Indian languages are important across the world because India’s position is second in terms of a populous country which also has a steadily growing economy. Indian languages are widely spoken in foreign lands like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Also, in many states abroad, the education system gives priorities to Indian languages like Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali.”
According to a new census data commissioned by Census India (GOI), Hindi and Bengali are top spoken languages in India.
“Over 97 million people have Bengali as their mother tongue in India. Also those who have migrated abroad keep their native language and culture alive. The Bengali community is expanding on a large scale in foreign lands,” added J Kumara, professor in foreign languages.
The reason for Hindi taking a back seat and giving the lead to Arabic is due to countries like the United Kingdom, whose education system is encouraging the Arabic language and universities have also begun separate courses in Arabic as well, say experts.
