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India’s Permanent Mission to the UN in New York commemorated World Hindi Day in the Mission on February 13. The theme of the event was “Multilingualism and the promotion of Hindi abroad.”
Union Minister of State for Women and Child Development, Savitri Thakur was the Guest of Honor in the event. In her address, Thakur recalled the initiation of the World Hindi Day on January 10, 2006. She highlighted that India has a multilingual and multicultural social fabric, according to India’s Permanent Mission to the UN in a New York press release.
Savitri Thakur noted that several initiatives are being taken to make Hindi a more popular language and recognition by the United Nations will make it a global language.
In his address, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Parvathaneni Harish, said that Hindi has been included in the list of non-official languages in the United Nations. Further, in the UN, India contributed around USD 7 million to promote UN News in Hindi. He also thanked the Department of Global Communications of the United Nations for their support in this regard.
“UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming stated that Hindi with a speaker base of 600 million, is of vital importance for the United Nations. She said that Hindi@UN project and other social media updates are bringing activities of the UN closer to Hindi speakers,” according to India’s Permanent Mission to the UN in New York.
Speakers in the event included prominent academics, who spoke about their experiences of promotion of Hindi in the US. They underscored that in a globalized world, multilingualism, media and modern technology can work towards expanding Hindi content on social media and digital platforms to increase its accessibility, particularly among the youth, according to the press release.
UN officials, language enthusiasts, representatives of Indian institutions, and several others attended the event. Earlier in January 2006, the Indian government initiated the World Hindi Day to strengthen efforts to promote and popularize Hindi on a global scale. Since then, World Hindi Day has been celebrated around the world every year.
