January 17, 2008 Language

The national language in India is Hindi but the national business language is English. Everyone speaks both languages plus their local language so most people seem to be tri-lingual. There are 24 languages in India and each has about 10 dialects which makes essentially 240 languages in the country! Each is very different from each other and can’t be understood by the next. I have finally learned the Hindi word “bus” which means “enough” and is very useful at mealtime. We are all having problems with the names and it seems the Indian people are having the same trouble with ours. Bernie got called “Jennifer” at one point and no one can easily pronounce “Elizabeth”. My name seems to be easy, thank goodness!