Honorifics in Hindi : a morphological, semantic and pragmatical analyses

Abstract

The usage of honorifics in a language is an important part of its pragmatics. The honorific system in Hindi reflects the interwoven mutual relationships among the individuals based on familial relationships, familiarity, formality, personal closeness, social status, castes and other social factors. This paper deals with honorific system of Hindi language, and analyses it morphologically, semantically and pragmatically. It also tries to give a foreign language learner of Hindi an inside look into uniqueness of the Indian society through the usages of different levels of honorifics and gives some suggestions for its usage.

Keywords

• Hindi
• honorifics
• morphology
• semantics
• pragmatics