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Preface

My First Book of Hindi Words introduces young children to the Hindi language and Indian culture through simple words.

Hindi is the official language of India but not everyone living there speaks Hindi. That is because India is a complex country with 22 main languages and about 500 dialects. That’s a lot of languages! Maybe it was confusing for the Government of India too, so in 1965, Hindi was made the official language. It may not be spoken everywhere in India but it is widely understood.

Hindi is written from left to right. It uses the Devanagari script, which has fourteen vowels and thirty-three consonants and is recognizable by the horizontal line that runs along the top of the letters. The ‘x’ sound does not start any word, but for this book I chose to include the word Xmas because it’s celebrated with great enthusiasm in India.

Hindi is a living language and has taken words from other languages, such as injun (engine) which comes from English and zukhaam (a cold) from Urdu. Hindi and Urdu speakers understand each other but cannot read each other’s scripts, unless of course they know both the languages.