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Hindi, the twentieth language

Hindi joins the list, with its own cast, its own script to learn, its own voice and its own course. That makes twenty languages to learn, and twenty to learn from — and Hindi is the first from outside Europe and East Asia.

Hindi is now one of the languages the app teaches, which brings the list to twenty: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

What adding a language means here

It isn't putting a name in a list. Hindi arrives with everything the others have:

• A cast who speak it, with lines of their own — the bookseller, the grandmother, the priest, the innkeeper.
• Its own alphabet section, because Devanagari is where anyone starting Hindi stalls.
• A voice for reading words and examples aloud.
• A course in the CEFR's levels, like every language here but Japanese, Chinese and Korean, which are learned on scales of their own.

Devanagari is not an alphabet

It's an abugida, which is a different bargain. Every consonant already carries an "a": क on its own is ka, not k. The other vowels aren't letters you set beside it but signs you hang on it — above it, below it, after it, and in one case written before the consonant you say it after.

So the letters section meets the vowels twice. Once standing on their own, which is how a word begins, and again as the signs they turn into inside one. Then the consonants in the order Devanagari itself puts them, by where in the mouth they're made — which is also the order that keeps ट and त side by side, the two sounds English hears as one "t" and Hindi does not.

Sixty pieces in all, a few at a time, the same as every other script here.

The people you meet

अनन्या sells second-hand books in Daryaganj and is on her third reading of Premchand. शांति दादी keeps a garden in a village near Mathura and will not hear that you are full. फ़ादर थॉमस has a parish in Delhi and knows every family in it. ग्रिमार pours his ale as he does everywhere.

They say आप to you, until they don't. Hindi keeps the polite आप and the familiar तुम apart, and someone deciding you've earned the second is something that happens in a conversation rather than a setting you flip.

The word you'll reach for is English

Every language here knows which neighbours leak into it — Ukrainian into Russian, Dutch into German. For Hindi it's English, and the habit is common enough to have a name: Hinglish. It is how Hindi is genuinely spoken, and it is also the thing that will quietly stop you learning the Hindi word. The cast notice, and hand it back to you.

What comes next

The last of these invited anyone waiting on Hindi to say so. Here it is.

The waitlist still asks which language you'd learn, and still offers “Something else” to anyone whose isn't there. That is how the next one gets picked — so if it's Arabic, Vietnamese, Bengali or Hebrew you're waiting on, that's where to say it.