Hindi grew rapidly in non-Hindi states even without official mandate

The language debate is back, and along with it, the hardening of positions for and against adopting Hindi as an officially-mandated common language across the country.

Data shows that Hindi has grown from strength to strength in the last four decades, and this happened despite no official mandate.

Sample the following data points to understand what changed over four decades starting in 1971:

- As per the 2011 Census, the percentage of the Hindi-speaking population stood at 44 — nearly seven percentage points more than in 1971. Bengali remains the second most spoken language with eight per cent of India’s population versed in that language. This is followed by Marathi at seven per cent.

- Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Hindi speakers increased by a whopping ten crore. This decadal addition was more than the total number of speakers of the second most spoken language in the country.

- Hindi remained the fastest-growing language among all the scheduled languages in 2011. The growth between the two censuses was more than 25 per cent. Hindi was followed by Kashmiri (23 per cent) and Manipuri (20 per cent).

- Nearly 53 crore people speak Hindi, followed by 9.7 crore Bengali speakers, and 8.3 crore Marathi speakers.

Hindi speakers moving to non-Hindi regions

This rapid pace of growth has been accompanied by the rising propensity of the Hindi-speaking population to move out from their place of birth, either for education or for work. Consequently, many Hindi speakers are shifting to non-Hindi areas.

According to the 2011 Census, in percentage terms, the number of Hindi speakers grew the most in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, among others.

Data shows that on average, there are 1,289 Hindi speakers among every 10,000 people in Maharashtra. The proportion stands at 369 and 330 in Andhra Pradesh (undivided at the time of the 2011 census) and Karnataka, respectively. The number is relatively small in the case of Tamil Nadu (55) and Kerala (16) but it is growing somewhat rapidly.

The Economic Survey of 2016-17 noted: “Political borders depress the flows of people, reflected in the fact that controlling for distance, labour migrant flows within states are four times the labour migrant flows across states.

However, language barriers appear not to create comparable frictions to the movement of goods and people within India. The prescient permissiveness of the founding fathers in not dictating a lingua franca for the country appears to have succeeded in making language less salient an axis of cleavage across India, a remarkable achievement given the early anxieties about linguistic divisions”.

Since considerable inter-mingling of the population has happened despite linguistic barriers, and without an officially-mandated common language policy, will a change now create friction?

Some leaders from the southern states have voiced their objections to any move to change the status quo. They are opposed to the idea of imposing Hindi on people with different mother tongues. The merits or demerits of such stances aside, it is undeniable that Hindi has grown and will likely continue in the near future as well.

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