Recently, the 3-day event “10th World Hindi Conference” was organised by the Ministry of External Affairs in cooperation with the Madhya Pradesh government in Bhopal. This conference takes place every 4-5 years all across the world. This is the third time that the World Hindi Conference has been organized in India.
The official press release can be found at: https://www.mea.gov.in/press-releases.htm?dtl/25246/10th_World_Hindi_Conference
Why is Hindi so important for businesses that need a foot hold in India
Look at the graph below for top 10 native spoken languages:
Hindi is at a healthy 4th position according to this data. Some other data sources say Hindi is the 6th most spoken language. In any case, without dispute the number of speakers in most studies in close to 300 million speakers and that it is close to top 5 languages either one position up or one down. The bigger debate here is not the position, but the market potential that this number generates.
Take a look at the number of states in which Hindi is spoken and understood (9 states out of total of 29 Indian states):
It’s widely understood /spoken in several other parts of India as well.
Imagine that any manufacturing or services company that needs to reach out to an untapped market – can they really ignore this market? The simple thinking should be that if I can communicate to these people in their language then I need to spend only on one language to reach out to more than 300mn people.
Note that I have underlined the word “communicate”. I want to highlight here that communication should not be understood as only readable or written text. It is important to note that media such as audio/video are more effective in spreading consumer information especially when you can do it quickly with a 2 minute audio or video and that too for people who have never gone to school. Don’t think about localizing your product/service or its information and advertising using text only – think multi-media.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vikaspediain-great-initiative-governance-india-9-indian-biraj-rath
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