In its narrowest sense, the term "Hindi" refers to Standard Hindi, a Sanskritized form of Khari Boli purged of a number of Persian borrowings that appeared during the Mughal era. In India, this Hindi is constitutionally designated an official state language, together with Urdu and three varieties of Hindi in the broad sense.
Standard Hindi, which became an official language of India on 26 January 1965, is used by the central government. Hindi is spoken mainly in northern states such as Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
Hindi is the second most important language of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is also used throughout central and northern India alongside Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi. Standard Hindi is understood by residents of some other areas of India and of neighboring countries (Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan).
In terms of the number of speakers, Hindi holds one of the leading positions in the world: only Chinese has more native speakers. According to 2001 data, the number of people who use various dialects of Hindi in everyday life is 422 million, which is roughly 41% of India's entire population.
History of the language
Hindi is believed to have developed from Shauraseni Prakrit, though there is no generally accepted view on when it emerged. It most likely arose in the form of local dialects. During the era of the Mughal Empire and the Delhi Sultanate, where Persian was used as the official language, the Hindi dialect known as Khari Boli absorbed a large number of Arabic and Persian words.
Features of the language
Defining the dialects of this language is an extremely complex matter. As a rule, the dialects that belong to Hindi proper are divided into two groups: Eastern Hindi and Western Hindi.
In general terms, Hindi is similar to other New Indo-Aryan languages. Phonetically, it is characterized by the loss of a number of final vowels and consonants; in morphology, by the absence of synthetic conjugation and declension; and in vocabulary, by an abundance of Arabic and Persian words.
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, which is used in religious books. The secular variety of this script is called Nagari. The cursive form of Nagari used by scribes is known as Kaithi or Kayasthi. Its further modification, adopted by the merchant class, is called Mahajani or Surafi. Alongside these scripts, Indian Muslims may use the Arabic script.