India is a beautiful, diverse country. This diversity can also be seen in the fact that it has 22 official “scheduled” languages as each state has a different language (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu). Out of these Hindi is the official language which is used for all governmental communication. English acts as a subsidiary official language of India.
But remember, you should never consider Hindi to be the lingua-franca for the entire country. In fact the language is met with a little bit of hostility in the north-eastern and southern part of the country.
Hinglish – a mix of Hindi and English – is extremely common among youngsters and is extensively used in day to day conversations, TV, radio, SMS and other forms of IM (in the Roman Script) and Bollywood.
Most official signs like those at railway stations and government offices are bilingual and use the state language along with English.
There are also a large number of English language TV shows which air on channels such as Zee Cafe, Star World, Fox Crime, FX and that too without any dubbing. A majority of these shows are American. TV channels such as Cartoon Network, Pogo, and Discovery may be dubbed in the native languages of the respective areas but the language can easily be changed to English in the audio settings.
While fluency in English may vary, depending on factors such as, level of education, occupation and age, it’s easy to get by with it in urban areas. The language is compulsory in all schools and is spoken widely in most major cities (especially tourist places), government offices and even police stations. Despite its wide acceptability, it’s always better to pick up as many phrases as possible of the local language of the place that you intend to visit. Indians really appreciate an outsider trying to understand their culture and language and will definitely be even more hospitable than usual if you try to do so.
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