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2026-08-255 min readThe Mumbai Destinations editorial team

English will get you through 95 percent of a visit, but about 20 words of Hindi and 5 of Marathi will change how the other 5 percent treats you.

Three languages, three jobs

Marathi is the state language and the language of the city's civic life, older shopkeepers, most government signage and a great deal of Girgaon, Dadar and Parel. Hindi, in Mumbai's own accented street version, is the lingua franca that a Marathi grandmother, a Tamil office cleaner and a Bihari taxi driver all use with each other. English is the language of business, menus, hotel front desks, contracts, most private signage and almost anyone under 40 in an office. All three coexist in a single sentence constantly, and nobody finds that odd.

For a visitor, that division of labour is the whole answer. Speak English in hotels, restaurants, offices, malls, museums, airline counters and app-based transport. Use Hindi with street-hailed taxi and auto drivers, market vendors, security guards, delivery riders and railway platform staff, who may have functional but limited English. Use your handful of Marathi words as a greeting and a courtesy, especially with older residents and in the island city, where it lands as respect rather than as performance. That is the ranking; getting it backwards is what makes interactions stiff.

The twenty Hindi words that do the work

Learn these and stop: kitna for how much, kitna hua for what does it come to, bahut mehenga for too expensive, thoda kam karo for reduce it a bit, seedha for straight ahead, left and right which are used as English words, yahan roko for stop here, aage for further on, peeche for behind, meter for run the meter, paani for water, chai, bill, khatam for finished, nahi chahiye for I do not want it, bas for enough, dhanyavaad and shukriya for thank you, bhaiya as a friendly address to a younger or same-age man, and haan and nahi.

That vocabulary covers fares, directions, markets, water and food, which is 90 percent of transactional Mumbai. Two grammar shortcuts help enormously. First, numbers: learn one to ten and hundred, sau, because prices are quoted as do sau for two hundred. Second, questions are made by tone rather than word order, so kitna with a rising inflection while pointing is a complete and perfectly polite sentence. Nobody expects tourists to conjugate. Mumbai rewards attempts far more than accuracy, and drivers in particular soften noticeably when a foreigner says yahan roko instead of stop-stop-stop.

Five Marathi words worth more than fifty Hindi ones

Namaskar as a greeting with palms together, kiti zhale for how much is it, dhanyavaad for thank you, kaka and mavshi as respectful address to an older man and woman, and bara for good or fine. Deploy them in Girgaon, Dadar, Mahim, Chembur, at a Maharashtrian thali restaurant or at a temple, and watch the temperature change. There is real feeling in Mumbai about the status of Marathi, and state rules require Marathi on shop signboards, so the language is far more visible than a visitor skimming English menus in Bandra would guess.

You do not need more than that unless you are staying for months. What matters is choosing the moment. Saying namaskar to a 25-year-old barista in Lower Parel is fine but pointless; saying it to the 60-year-old owner of a Dadar snack shop is the difference between a transaction and a conversation about where you are from. Do not attempt Marathi with a taxi driver who is speaking Hindi to you; he may be from Uttar Pradesh and you will both end up confused. Read the person, not the postcode.

Reading the signs: three scripts, one alphabet

Marathi and Hindi both use Devanagari, so learning to recognise a dozen letter shapes unlocks station names, bus destination boards and shop signs at once. Railway boards are trilingual as a rule, with the station name in Marathi, Hindi and English on the same plate, which makes the suburban network navigable even if the announcement is in Marathi first. Bus destination boards are often Marathi only on older buses, and route numbers are in Arabic numerals, so a route number plus a landmark is what you actually need for a BEST bus.

Menus split by cuisine, not by area. South Indian canteens list dishes in English transliteration, Maharashtrian places may list in Marathi with English underneath, Gujarati thali houses in Bhuleshwar sometimes only in Gujarati script, and the mill-district restaurants are English throughout. If a menu defeats you, point at what the next table has; this is completely normal behaviour in a Mumbai canteen and often produces better food than ordering. Download offline Hindi and Marathi in a translation app before you land, and use the camera mode on signboards.

Addresses are landmarks, not numbers

The single most useful linguistic fact about Mumbai is that nobody navigates by street address. A local address is building name, then road, then near-landmark, then suburb, and the landmark is the operative part. Telling a driver 14th Road, Khar West gets a blank look; telling him Khar, near the Gymkhana, gets you there. Learn the landmark for your hotel and your meeting: a station, a flyover, a temple, a cinema, a hospital, a well-known restaurant. Write it in your phone in Devanagari as well, so you can show it rather than pronounce it.

This also explains why app cabs sometimes stop 200 m away. Pin accuracy is poor on service roads, so the effective instruction is a phone call plus a landmark. Keep the driver's number when the app assigns it, answer when he calls, and say the landmark and then a direction word: aage, peeche, left, right. Two Hindi words and one landmark resolve nearly every failed pickup in the city. Hotel doormen are also unofficial translators; if a call is going badly, hand the phone over and it will be sorted in fifteen seconds.

Where English quietly fails

Not where visitors expect. Hotels, restaurants, airlines and offices are fine. English breaks down at street-hailed taxis and autos, at market stalls in Crawford Market and Bhuleshwar, with security guards at residential gates, with the ticket-window queue at a suburban station at rush hour, with domestic-airline ground staff during a disruption when everyone reverts to Hindi at speed, and in a hospital pharmacy. In all of those, the fix is not louder English; it is short Hindi phrases, numbers and pointing, plus patience with a stranger who will invariably step in to translate unasked.

There is a subtler failure mode: English spoken too fast, with idioms and a non-Indian accent, to someone who reads and writes English perfectly well. Slow down, drop the contractions, and use Indian English vocabulary where you know it, so a mobile phone rather than a cell phone, a lift rather than an elevator, a hotel meaning a modest restaurant, and a boarding point rather than a stop. Say the numbers digit by digit. That adjustment removes most of the friction visitors blame on language when it is actually pace.

Etiquette carried in the words

Forms of address matter more than grammar. Bhaiya for a man roughly your age or younger, sir or madam for anyone in a uniform or behind a desk, kaka or mavshi for older Marathi speakers, and dada as a warm regional address. Avoid calling anyone boy or using the imperative with no softener; add zara or thoda, meaning a little, to any request and it becomes polite. Head movements are part of the language too: the sideways tilt that means yes, fine, understood is ubiquitous and you will find yourself doing it by day three.

Two things not to say. Do not use the old colonial name for the city with anyone who might feel strongly about it; the city is Mumbai, and the older name survives mainly in institution names and in some residents' casual speech. And do not open with a question about religion, caste or politics in a taxi, however friendly the conversation, because it is the one topic that turns a warm exchange cold. Cricket, food, rain and the traffic are the four safe subjects, and any of them will get you a twenty-minute monologue you will enjoy.

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