Romanized Hindi

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Romanized Hindi

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Sat, 2022-09-24 03:11
Regarding: 
Writing
State
Closed
ISO 639-3: 
hin

According to Palakodety (p. 7-9, link), Romanized Hindi is the "dominant form of native language expression online" in India. In particular, they provide the results of a study of YouTube comments: 52% are written in Romanized Hindi, 46% in English, and only 1% in Devanagari Hindi.

I couldn't find other sources, but this is consistent with what Indian friends told me, and what I could see myself, for instance on the official Twitter accounts of the largest Hindi-language TV channels:

I suggest writing: "Devanagari script [Deva], traditional and formal usage. Latin script, recent informal usage, especially online on social media."

Editorial Action

We will add Latin as a script (writing system) for Hindi [hin] with the following statement: "recent informal usage, especially online on social media".  This addition will be included in the next edition of the Ethnologue.


Comments

Chuck Fennig, Tue, 2022-10-04 14:41

Dear Antoine,

Thank you for this information on "Romanized Hindi".

I am forwarding on this information to the Ethnologue Scripts Editor, Lorna Evans.

Best regards,

Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue

Chuck Fennig, Thu, 2022-10-20 13:35

Antoine,

After discussion between Lorna and the editorial team, it was decided to include "Latin" as a script used for Hindi [hin]. In fact, they decided to use your exact wording: "Latin script, recent informal usage, especially online on social media." (But, you will not see this until the next edition - Feb. 2023.)

Best regards,

Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue

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