Indian Languages

I am curious why is it that there is only Gujarati? Is there any special reason for this? I would be interested in finding out more about Hindi (has a huge amount on Wikipedia for example). How close are these languages in reality? Is there any point looking at Gujarati to aid Hind, like Norwegian and Danish?

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Well, for Gujarati some user(s) apparently made the effort to hit the requirements for LingQ adding a language (translation of MS, news resource, grammar guide…) and for Hindi this has not happened yet. Personally, I am not really interested in learning Hindi. However, I think that LingQ should strongly consider initiating incubation for a Hindi course and not leave this alone with volunteers. Taking a look at the most popular Duolingo courses you see that Hindi is ranked sixth (!) and hence is not only a language with a ridiculously high amount of native and L2 speakers but also growing in popularity as a target language for learners around the world. The potential to get at least some of the possibly unsatisfied learner base at Duolingo to LingQ is tempting in my opinion.

But this decision is up to the LingQ management :wink:
Gujarati is somehow related (not as much as Urdu though) to Hindi but apart from that has also 60 million native speakers. So if you are interested in the region anyway, I don’t think that learning Gujarati would be a bad idea.

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Selfishly, I would love if they added Bengali to the mix - by my understanding there is a volunteer-translated set of the ministories, but it still needs to be confirmed accurate, then audio developed, then whatever else is needed to get a language up in minimal form. I’d be happy with a beta option (even with no dictionary support), but understand past reasonings given as to why they wouldn’t.

That said, I can definitely agree that Hindi would be a good and natural next language to get up, especially given the Duolingo popularity and the increasingly global nature of Hindi-language media.

I don’t know enough about Gujarati/Hindi to give my own answer, but a Google search result compared it to Italian/Spanish - not mutually intelligible like Finnish/Norwegian can be, but definitely enough similarities or common roots where knowing one may speed up learning the second.

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