Over 100 people gathered at the Indian Consulate in Melbourne on 10th January, Sunday to celebrate the International Hindi Day.
Many esteemed members of the Indian community gathered to discuss and share the 'spread of hindi language in Australia'. Organised inside the premises of Indian Consulate in Melbourne, the discussion was kicked off with an address from the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, who has played a huge role in promoting Hindi abroad. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who prefers to speak in Hindi over English, has often spoken in Hindi at International events and gatherings.
Hosted by the Acting Consul Nirmal Choudhary, the gathered group in Melbourne comprised Subhash Sharma, Ramesh Dave, Prof. Bhargava, Ramesh Dave, Harihar Jha, Rahul Gupta, Arun Sharma, Jaya Sharma, Prof. Ian Woolford and SBS Hindi's Mosiqi Acharya.
Source: Mosiqi Acharya
The most common concern that emerged during this discussion was 'How do we get our children in Australia to learn Hindi?'
Dr. Dinesh Srivastava from the Victorian School of Languages has been working since years to teach the language to senior students but the participation is quite low from the Indian community. However, Narendar Garg, who runs Gurukul (a school that teaches Hindi in Craigieburn, Melbourne) said that he had received great response from the community in Craigieburn and was soon thinking of opening batches to teach Sanskrit.
On International Hindi Day, members of Indian community shared their ideas to promote Hindi within the community and at the same time, promised to keep up the efforts to promote Hindi as an important language in schools too.
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Interesting facts about Hindi Language
Hindi is world's second most spoken language.
Hindi, also known as khadi-boli, belongs to Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family.
Nearly 425 million speak Hindi as their first language and nearly 120 million as their second language.
Just like European languages, Hindi is written from left to right.
Besides Indians who reside across the world, Hindi is also a commonly used language in Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Nepal, Trinidad and Tobago.
