Spoken in: India, Nepal, Fiji, with significant minorities in the Philippines, Thailand, UK, USA, Canada, Dubai, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius.

Total speakers: First language: 370 million; Second language: 580 million; Overall: 950 million Source: (1991).

Language family: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Hindī.

Writing system: Devanagari script.

Official status
Official language in: India, Fiji (as Hindustani).

Regulated by: Central Hindi Directorate (only in India).

Hindi, an Indo-European language spoken all over India in varying degrees and extensively in northern and central India, is one of the 22 official languages of India and is used, along with English, for central government administrative purposes. It is part of a language continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati; on the south by Marathi and Konkani; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Bengali; and on the north by Nepali. More precisely, Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani language termed khariboli, that emerged as the standard dialect.


Etymology

The word Hindī comprises Hind "India", and the adjectival suffix ī. Hence Hindī translates to "Indian". Nowadays Hindī as taken to mean "Indian" is chiefly obsolete; it has come to specifically refer to the language(s) bearing that name.


Area

Hindi is the predominant language in the Indian states and union territories of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Linguistic scholars refer to this area as the Hindi belt.

Distinctive non-standard varieties of Hindi are spoken in large, urban areas outside of the Hindi belt. Most notable of these are those spoken in Mumbai, Calcutta, and Hyderabad. Overseas forms of Hindi are found in Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. Recent immigration to the west, e.g. Europe, UK, USA etc. has resulted in the establishment of Hindi-speaking communities there as well.


Number of speakers

According to the 1991 census of India (which encompasses all the dialects of Hindi, including those that might be considered separate languages by some linguists—e.g., Bhojpuri), Hindi is the mother tongue of about 487 million Indians, or about 40% of India's population that year. According to SIL International's Ethnologue, about 180 million people in India regard standard (Khari Boli) Hindi as their mother tongue, and another 300 million use it as a second language. Outside India, Hindi speakers number around 8 million in Nepal, 890,000 in South Africa, 685,000 in Mauritius, 317,000 in the U.S., 233,000 in Yemen, 147,000 in Uganda, 30,000 in Germany, 20,000 in New Zealand and 5,000 in Singapore, while the UK and UAE also have notable populations of Hindi speakers. Hence, according to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), a combination of Hindi and Urdu languages makes it the fifth most spoken language in the world.

According to Comrie (1998 data), Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world, with 333 million native speakers.

From 1991 to 2006, the population of India has grown by about 30% (from 838 to 1,095 million), so that the number of current speakers may be expected to be roughly a third higher than those given above.hindi


Official status

The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, declares Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Union (Article 343(1)). Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two languages of communication for the Central Government.

It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965, with state governments being free to function in languages of their own choice. This has not, however, happened and English is also used along with Hindi for official purposes.Though Hindi is the national language of India, people from states where Hindi is not the native language tend to accept the imposed dominance of the language with skepticism. Very often they consider their language to be culturally richer as it may be older and more evolved in terms of literature. There was widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, in some states, especially the Anti-Hindi agitations in the state of Tamil Nadu, which resulted in the passage of the Official Languages Act (1963). This act provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes, by the Union government. However, the constitutional directive to the central government to champion the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced the policies of the Union government.

At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Delhi. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states.


History of the Hindi language

Like many other modern Indian languages, it is believed that Hindi had been evolved from Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. Though there is no consensus for a specific time, Hindi originated as local dialects such as Braj, Awadhi and finally Khari Boli after the turn of tenth century. In the span of nearly a thousand years of Muslim influence, such as when Muslim rulers controlled much of northern India during the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, many Persian and Arabic words were absorbed into khari boli and was called Urdu or Hindustani. Since almost all Arabic words came via Persian, they do not preserve the original phonology of Arabic.

Hindi is only contrasted with Urdu in the way both were written. Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and also an official language in some parts of India. The primary differences between the two are the way Standard Hindi is written in Devanagari and draws its "vocabulary" with words from (Indo-Aryan) Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in Nastaliq script, a variant of the (Semitic) Perso-Arabic script, and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic "vocabulary." Vocabulary is in quotes here since it is mostly the literary vocabulary that shows this visible distinction with the everyday vocabulary being essentially common between the two. To a common unbiased person, both Hindi and Urdu are same (Hindustani) though politics of religion and ethnicity portrays them as two separate languages since they are written in two entirely different scripts Hindi-Urdu controversy. Interestingly, if Urdu is written in Devanagiri script, it will be assumed as Hindi and vice versa. The popular examples are Bollywood songs and gazals.


Vocabulary

Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Standard or shuddh ("pure") Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindustani, whose vocabulary contains words drawn from Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from English and other languages as well.

Vernacular Urdu and Hindi share the same grammar and core vocabulary and so are practically indistinguishable. However, the literary registers differ substantially in borrowed vocabulary; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. Hindi has looked to Sanskrit for borrowings from at least the 19th century, and Urdu has looked to Persian and Arabic for borrowings from the eighteenth century. On another dimension, Hindi has been associated with the Hindu community and Urdu with the Muslim community.

Hindi from which most of the Persian, Arabic and English words have been ousted and replaced by tatsam words is called Shuddha Hindi (pure Hindi). Chiefly, the proponents of the so-called Hindutva ("Hindu-ness") are vociferous supporters of Shuddha Hindi.

Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for most native speakers. Strictly speaking, the tatsam words are words of Sanskrit and not of Hindi—thus they have complicated consonantal clusters which are not linguistically valid in Hindi. The educated middle class population of India can pronounce these words with ease, but people of rural backgrounds have much difficulty in pronouncing them. Similarly, vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic also brings in its own consonantal clusters and "foreign" sounds, which may again cause difficulty in speaking them.


Dialects

Difficulties in the enumeration and classification of Hindi dialects are many. They include confusion in terminology (e.g. "Hindi", "Urdu", "Hindustani", etc.), variation as to the range of what constitutes the continuum of Hindi, varying schemata for the classification of Indo-Aryan languages in general, the existence of a complex network of literary languages/traditions (e.g. Braj, Awadhi, Maithili, etc.) which at certain times have been subsumed under the rubric of "Hindi", varying practices and assumptions on the part of governmental, planning, and education organizations and bodies as to the constitution of Hindi, and lastly a highly nuanced and complex state of affairs in regards to the language's socially determined registers.

If there can be considered a census within the dialectology of Hindi proper, it is that it can be split into two sets of dialects: Western and Eastern Hindi. This analysis excludes varieties sometimes claimed for Hindi, such as Bihari, Rajasthani, and Pahari.

Thus Hindi proper includes:

- Western Hindi (the speech varieties developed from Sauraseni):
-- Braj, spoken in western Uttar Pradesh and adjacent districts of Rajasthan and Hariyana.
-- Hariyanvi or Bangaru, spoken in the state of Haryana and some outlying areas of Delhi.
-- Bundeli, spoken in west-central Madhya Pradesh.
-- Kannauji, spoken in west-central Uttar Pradesh.
-- Kauravi or Vernacular Hindustani, spoken to the north and northeast of Delhi.
-- Khari boli, the language's standard dialect, generally identified with the grammatical core of Kauravi (vernacular Hindustani), but displaying features of other dialects and adjacent languages, as well as non-Indic speech such as Persian. It is forms the basis of the standard registers of Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu.

- Eastern Hindi (the speech varieties developed from Ardhamagadhi):
-- Awadhi, spoken in north and north-central Uttar Pradesh.
-- Bagheli, spoken in north-central Madhya Pradesh and central Uttar Pradesh.
-- Chattisgarhi, spoken in southeast Madhya and northern and central Chattisgarh.

- Non-Hindi regions in the Indian subcontinent:
-- Bambaiya Hindi, the dialect of the city of Bombay (Mumbai); it is based on Khariboli dialect, but heavily influenced by Marathi and Gujarati. Technically it is a pidgin, i.e., neither is it a mother language of any people nor is it used in formal settings by the educated and upper social strata. However, it is often used in the movies of Hindi cinema (Bollywood), where it often gives a comical effect on the movie characters.
-- Dakhini, as discussed above.
-- Kalkatiya Hindi, another Khariboli-based pidgin spoken in the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), Shillong, etc., heavily influenced by Bhojpuri and Bengali.
-- Arunachal Hindi is a regional dialect of Hindi popularly spoken in Hindi. This is an amalmagation of Hindi and the various tribal dialects of the state. Words such as 'Yamtar', meaning "pickle" are spoken instead of 'achaar' and so on. Arunachal Hindi is the most popular language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh even in the most remote parts of the state.

- Outside the Indian subcontinent:
-- Mauritian Hindi, spoken in Mauritius, based on Bhojpuri and influenced by French.
-- Sarnami, a form of Bhojpuri with Awadhi influence spoken by Surinamers of Indian descent.
-- Fiji Hindi, derived form of Awadhi, Bhojpuri and including many English and native Fijian words, is spoken by Fijians of Indian descent.
-- Trinidad Hindi, based on Bhojpuri, and spoken in Trinidad and Tobago by people of Indian descent.
-- South African Hindi, based on Bhojpuri, and spoken in South Africa by people of Indian descent.

Hindi and Urdu

The term Urdu arose in 1645. Until then, and even after 1645, the term Hindi or Hindawi was used in a general sense for the dialects of central and northern India.

The colloquial language spoken by the people of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or Urdu by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard (as far as the formal vocabulary is concerned).

These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that many extreme-nationalists, both Hindu and Muslim, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. The tensions reached a peak in the Hindi-Urdu controversy in 1867 in the then United Provinces during the British Raj. However, there were and are unifying forces as well. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is the same as that of Urdu speakers in Pakistan.


Writing system

Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida which is written from left to right.


Transliteration Conventions

The standard transliteration of Hindi into the Roman alphabet is usually the IAST scheme, whereby the retroflex consonants (retroflex t, d, their aspirates, n, vowel-like r) and the breath h are shown with a dot beneath; the long vowels are shown with a macron or a bar (as ā above); aspiration of a plosive is shown with a following h; and elided a's are removed for a truer correspondence to speech. Other alphabet characters are pronounced as in normal English. Another transliteration (ITRANS) uses capital letters of English to transcribe the long vowels and retroflex consonants. However, since English is a lingua franca of the educated Indians, and since computer keyboards do not have features for typing the IAST characters, Indians today use a casual transliteration into English for Hindi words; in such a casual transliteration, used especially in online chatting, the retroflex and dental consonants are not differentiated, and neither the short and the long vowels (except that sometimes people double the alphabet to indicate a long vowel).


Grammar

Despite Hindi and English both being Indo-European languages, Hindi grammar is different in many ways from what English speakers are used to. Most notably, Hindi is a subject-object-verb language, meaning that verbs usually fall at the end of the sentence rather than before the object (as in English). Hindi also shows mixed ergativity so that, in some cases, verbs agree with the object of a sentence rather than the subject. Unlike English, Hindi has no definite article (the). The numeral ek might be used as the indefinite singular article (a/an) if this needs to be stressed.

In addition, Hindi uses postpositions (so called because they are placed after nouns) where English uses prepositions. Other differences include gender, honorifics, interrogatives, use of cases, and different tenses. While being complicated, Hindi grammar is fairly regular, with irregularities being relatively limited. Despite differences in vocabulary and writing, Hindi grammar is nearly identical with Urdū. The concept of punctuation having been entirely unknown before the advent of the Europeans, Hindi punctuation uses western conventions for commas, exclamation points, and question marks. Periods are sometimes used to end a sentence, though the traditional "full stop" (a vertical line) is also used.

Word order

The standard word order in Hindi is, in general, Subject Object Verb, but where different emphasis or more complex structure is needed, this rule is very easily set aside (provided that the nouns/pronouns are always followed by their postpositions or case markers). More specifically, the standard order is 1. Subject 2. Adverbs (in their standard order) 3. Indirect object and any of its adjectives 4. Direct object and any of its adjectives 5. Negation term or interrogative, if any, and finally the 6. Verb and any auxiliary verbs. (Snell, p93) The standard order can be modified in various ways to impart emphasis on particular parts of the sentence.

Tense and aspect of Hindi verbs

Hindi verbal structure is focused on aspect with distinctions based on tense usually shown through use of the verb honā (to be) as an auxiliary. There are three aspects: habitual (imperfect), progressive (also known as continuous) and perfective. Verbs in each aspect are marked for tense in almost all cases with the proper inflected form of honā. Hindi has four simple tenses, present, past, future (presumptive), and subjunctive (referred to as a mood by many linguists). Verbs are conjugated not only to show the number and person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) of their subject, but also its gender. Additionally, Hindi has imperative and conditional moods. The verbs must agree with the person, number and gender of the subject if and only if the subject is not followed by any postposition. If this condition is not met, the verb must agree with the number and gender of the object (provided the object does not have any postposition). If this condition is also not met, the verb agrees with neither. It is this kind of phenomenon that is called mixed ergativity.

Case

Hindi is a weakly inflected language for case; the relationship of a noun in a sentence is usually shown by postpositions (i.e., prepositions that follow the noun). Hindi has three cases for nouns. The Direct case is used for nouns not followed by any postpositions, typically for the subject case. The Oblique case is used for any nouns that is followed by a postposition. Adjectives modifying nouns in the oblique case will inflect that same way. Some nouns have a separate Vocative case. Hindi has two numbers: singular and plural—but they may not be shown distinctly in all declinations.


Hindi literature

Entertainment and showbusiness

Hindi films play an important role in popular culture. The dialogues and songs of Hindi films use Khariboli and Hindi-Urdu in general, but the intermittent use of various dialects such as Awadhi, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri, Punjabi and quite often Bambaiya Hindi, as also of many English words, is common.

Alam Ara (1931), which ushered in the era of "talkie" films in India, was a Hindustani film. This film had seven songs in it. Music soon became an integral part of Hindustani/ Hindi cinema. It is a very important part of popular culture and now comprises an entire genre of popular music. So popular is film music that songs filmed even 50-60 years ago are a staple of radio/TV and are generally very familiar to an Indian.

Hindi movies and songs are popular in many parts of India, such as Punjab, Gujarat and Maharashtra, that do not speak Hindi as a native language. Indeed, the Hindi film industry is largely based at Mumbai (Bombay), in the Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra. Hindi films are also popular abroad, especially in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran and UK.

The role of radio and television in propagating Hindi beyond its native audience cannot be overstated. Television in India was controlled by the central government until the proliferation of satellite TV rendered regulation redundant. During the era of control, Hindi predominated on both radio and TV, enjoying more air-time than local languages. After the advent of satellite TV, several private channels emerged to compete with the government's official TV channel. Today, a large number of satellite channels provide viewers with much variety in entertainment. These include soap operas, detective serials, horror shows, dramas, cartoons, comedies, host shows for Hindi songs, Hindu mythology and documentaries.

Hinglish

"Hinglish" is the use of Hindi and English, combining both, in one sentence. This is more commonly seen in urban and semi-urban centers of population, but is slowly spreading its root into rural and remote areas via television and word of mouth, slowly achieving vernacular status. Many speakers do not realize that they are incorporating English words into Hindi sentences or Hindi words into English sentences.

This highly popular mixing of both the languages in most parts of northern and central India has grown from the fact that English is a popular language of choice amongst the urban youth who find themselves comfortable in its lexicon. It is already the medium for imparting education in many schools across the nation. The advent of cable television and its pervasive growth has seen the masses exposed to a wide variety of programming from across the world. Another factor contributing to the spread of Hinglish is the popularity of Bollywood films.