# How Hindified Is Kannada, Actually?

If you know me personally, you know this already.

I do not speak Hindi.

I know *thoda thoda* Hindi. Enough to order food, ask for directions, and confidently say one sentence before somebody replies with an entire paragraph and I am finished.

The funny part?

I scored 97/100 in Hindi in school.

To this day, I have no idea how.

Recently, I started learning Hindi on Duolingo. Mostly because I keep going on solo trips up north, and knowing more than *thoda thoda* Hindi would be useful. It would save me from doing hand gestures, pointing at menus, and nodding like I completely understand what is happening.

But Duolingo made me notice something else.

Kannada is more Hindified than I realised.

Or at least, everyday Kannada has more words that feel very familiar once you start learning Hindi.

Take **ಗಾಡಿ** (*gaadi*).

Growing up, it was just a Kannada word. Gaadi bandide. Gaadi nillisu. Gaadi elli ide?

Then Duolingo says *gaadi* in Hindi and I am like, wait. This is the same gaadi.

And then there is **jaldi**. **Baaki**. **Majaa**. **Saab**. **Khaali**. **Achaanak**.

Some of these words come to Kannada through Hindi or Hindustani. Some travelled through Urdu, Persian, Marathi, Sanskrit, or a combination of all of them. *Bazaar*, for example, has a Persian story behind it. So calling every familiar word “Hindi” is probably the linguistic version of seeing a bug and immediately blaming the last person who touched the code.

Still, the feeling is funny.

You spend your whole life thinking a word belongs completely to one language. Then you learn another language and suddenly find it sitting there too, wearing a slightly different outfit.

The quagmire gets deeper when you look things up. *Gaadi* is listed as a Hindustani borrowing in Kannada, but it is also in [Kittel’s Kannada-English dictionary](https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/kittel/) from 1894. So this is not exactly Duolingo discovering a fresh Hindi invasion into Kannada. Languages have been borrowing, mixing, travelling, and stealing each other’s good words for a very long time.

Maybe that is why I do not think this is a bad thing.

Kannada is still Kannada when I say *swalpa adjust maadi*. It is still Kannada when somebody says *yaake guru?* It is still Kannada even when the sentence has English, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, and probably three emotions inside it.

Honestly, Bengaluru Kannada is its own beautiful chaos.

We already say things like:

> Swalpa jaldi banni, gaadi alli iddeeni.

And nobody stops the conversation to ask which word entered the language at what century.

We understand it. That is enough.

Maybe learning a new language does not just teach you new words. It makes you notice the words you already have.

Now every time Duolingo teaches me something familiar, I am suspicious.

Was this Hindi all along?

Was this Kannada?

Was this Persian quietly travelling through three languages and ending up in my apartment in Bengaluru?

Who knows.

But if anyone knows more words like this, please tell me. I am now fully ready to ruin normal conversations by saying, “Actually, do you know where that word came from?”