Hindi Language

Hindi Language, major language of India and one of its official national languages. It has around 180 million first-language speakers in India, and is a second language for many more (around 50 per cent of the population).

Native speakers of Hindi are concentrated in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. In Bihar, the status of a separate Bihāri language (actually a collection of three major dialect groupings) is unclear and it is not officially recognized, but subsumed under Hindi.

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language, a direct descendant of Sanskrit, and is written in the Devanagari script. When India attained independence in 1947, Hindi was intended to be the sole national language, but since less than half of the population had a working knowledge of it, it came to share that title with English.

In essence, Hindi and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, are the same language, but Urdu is written in the Persian-Arabic script and has adopted a large part of its vocabulary from those languages, whereas Hindi draws on Sanskrit vocabulary. (The word “Hindustani” was used to refer to Hindi and Urdu jointly before the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.)

Modern Hindi literature is regarded as having begun in the early 17th century. The modern literary language has diverged into four distinct varieties, called High, Nagari, Literary, and Standard Hindi.

Compared with Sanskrit, Hindi has a greatly simplified morphology and syntax, with two genders and two basic noun cases, but the verb system remains fairly complex. The sound system of Hindi observes distinctions between aspirated (“breathed”) and non-aspirated consonants, and between dental and retroflex ones.

Hindi is widespread outside India as well, with sizeable communities speaking it in Mauritius, South Africa, and parts of the Middle East and East Africa.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.