Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 September 19

= September 19 =

How much Hindi is written in Latin online?
When I see content in Hindi online it is mostly written in Latin characters, especially on social media. For instance: And yet our page about Hindi does not say anything about this practice (we have an article about Roman Urdu though). Do we have data about this use? Is it only limited to social media? Informal texts (SMS for instance)? Are there regional differences in India (more Latin in Mumbay and Delhi? less in rural areas?)? A455bcd9 (talk) 16:02, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Sony Entertainment Television's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/sonytv
 * StarPlus's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/StarPlus
 * Star Bharat's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/StarBhara
 * Even on some government websites, e.g.: this logo


 * The link "Romanized Hindi " redirects to Devanagari transliteration, which says "Many webpages are written in ITRANS. Many forums are also written in ITRANS." -- AnonMoos (talk) 16:24, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, unfortunately this section isn't sourced. And we don't know how much ITRANS is used ("many websites": 1% of Hindi content? 10%? 50%? 90%?). A455bcd9 (talk) 17:30, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
 * "Many webpages are written in ITRANS. Many forums are also written in ITRANS"—This statement is not just unsourced, but plain wrong. ITRANS is a specific scheme for the scholarly transliteration of Devanagari (more specifically, it is a scheme that only makes use of ASCII characters, replacing diacritics by upper case letters and punctuation characters). However, the use of such scholarly transliteration schemes is almost entirely restricted to the academic world. In non-academic contexts (websites, social media, messaging, etc.), an non-standardized informal type of transcription is used. --Jbuchholz (talk) 07:45, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I added "citation needed span", but it may be better to remove this sentence entirely. I'm surprised that I cannot find reliable sources on this subject. For Arabic, there are many articles on this subject (example). A455bcd9 (talk) 08:00, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I found this source: "Romanized variants are the dominant form of native language expression online. In a collection of YouTube comments [...] Hinglish [note, here: Romanized Hindi, 52% of comments, vs 46% for English and 1% for Hindi in Devanagari] was by far the most used form of expression." They also offer a map of India with the regions where Hinglish is more used (vs Hindi in Devanagari).
 * I'll update the related Wikipedia articles accordingly. A455bcd9 (talk) 07:58, 24 September 2022 (UTC)