The World Hindi Conference co-hosted by the governments of India and Fiji from February 15-17 in Nadi, Fiji was inaugurated External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. The main theme of the conference is “Hindi – Traditional Knowledge to Artificial Intelligence”.

The concept of World Hindi Conferences was envisaged by Rashtrabhasha Prachar Samiti, Wardha in 1973. As a result, the first World Hindi Conference was organized four and half decades back from January 10-12, 1975 in Nagpur, India. To date 11 World Hindi Conferences have been organized in different parts of the world.

Hindi is the 3rd most spoken language of the world in 2019 with 615 million speakers. The 22nd edition of the world language database Ethnologue stated English at the top of the list with 1,132 million speakers. Chines Mandarin is at the second position with 1,117 million speakers. Bangla has been ranked as the 7th most spoken language of the world. Bangla has 228 million native speakers.

According to the 2011 census, 528 million Indians speak Hindi as against Bengali (97.2 million), Marathi (83 million) Telugu (81 million) and Tamil (69 million) speakers.

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The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution consists of the following 22 languages:- (1) Assamese, (2) Bengali, (3) Gujarati, (4) Hindi, (5) Kannada, (6) Kashmiri, (7) Malayalam, (8)  Marathi, (09)  Oriya, (10) Punjabi, (11) Sanskrit, , (12) Tamil, (13) Telugu, (14) Urdu.

Of these languages, 14 above were initially included in the Constitution. Sindhi language was added in 1967(21^st Amendment Act). Thereafter three more languages viz., Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali (71^st Amendment Act)  were included in 1992. Subsequently Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali were added in 2004 (91^st Amendment Act).

Article 29 of the Constitution provides that a section of citizens having a distinct language, script or culture have the right to conserve the same.