To Make Hindi an Official UN Language

To: Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations


Sir,

Following are the 6 official UN languages

Chinese- 874 million
English- 341 million
Spanish- 322 million
Russian- 167 million
French- 72 million
Arabic- 42 million

* Source- The World 2004, Wikipedia

It is astonishing and unfortunate that with 366 million speakers, Hindi is excluded from this list. Let me put forward the case for the most widely spoken language in the worlds largest democracy, India.

1. Absolute Number of Speakers

Since we are increasingly living in a global society, the sheer number of speakers for Hindi definitely bolsters its bid. Many languages spoken through out the Indian Sub-Continent closely resemble Hindi and it has a wide audience, both core and peripheral. Moreover, Hindi is the second language or the language of wider communication (LWC) for most parts of India.

2. Global Reach

Although it could be questioned whether this criteria is being met currently by Arabic, Russian and Chinese on the UN list, our purpose simply is to put forward a case for Hindi and not torpedo that of other languages.

Through out the world 11 countries* (including the United States and the United Kingdom) in the world have over 1 million Indians, and as many as 22 countries have Indians numbering over 100,000. Hindi is naturally either the native language for them, or used as the LWC for communicating with other Indians. Apart from the sub-continent, Hindi has considerable speakers in South East Asia, Africa, Western Europe, Australasia and North America.

* Source- The World 2004, Wikipedia

We hope that you would seriously give a thought to the injustice being handed to Hindi by excluding it from the official UN languages list. The UN would do the world a much greater service were it to hold out its hand and reach out more effectively to the Hindi speakers of the world.