Hindi not competitor but friend of all regional languages: Shah

Surat: Hindi language is not a competitor but a "friend" of all the other regional languages in the country and they are mutually dependent on each other for their growth, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said here on Wednesday.

He denounced the "disinformation" campaign to pit Hindi against native languages and underlined the need to strengthen local languages with Hindi.

Addressing the All India Official Language Conference in Surat city on Hindi Day, Shah said that accepting the co-existence of languages was needed and stressed the need to make Hindi flexible by taking words from other languages to expand its dictionary.

Shah observed that unless the Hindi language becomes flexible, it cannot grow.

"I want to make one thing very clear. Some people are spreading disinformation that Hindi and Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil, Hindi and Marathi are competitors. Hindi cannot be a competitor to any other language in the country. You must understand that Hindi is the friend of all the languages of the country," Shah said.

He said native languages in the country will prosper only when Hindi prospers, and vice versa.

"Everybody should accept and understand this. So long as we do not accept the co-existence of languages, we cannot realise the dream of running the country in our own language. And I want to say with sincerity that it should be our aim to keep all the languages and mother tongues alive and prosperous. Only with the prosperity of all these languages will Hindi prosper," Shah added.

He said Hindi is an inclusive language and called for strengthening native languages along with Hindi.

Shah said the British banned literary works in various Indian languages, including 264 poetry works in Hindi, 58 in Urdu, 19 in Tamil, 10 in Telugu, 22 each in Punjabi and Gujarati, 123 in Marathi, nine in Sindhi, 11 in Odiya, 24 in Bangla, and one in Kannada.

"This shows how Rajbhasha and native languages strengthened the freedom struggle which forced the British to ban them," he said.