Hindi

Hindī हिन्दी, हिंदी
Spoken in:	India (also widely understood in Pakistan,Bangladesh & Nepal)
Region:	Indian Subcontinent
Total speakers:	ca. 490 million native, 790 million total
Ranking:	3
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Central zone     Western Hindi      Hindustani       Hindī
Writing system:	Devanagari script
Official status
Official language of:	India, Fiji (as Hindustani)
Regulated by:	Central Hindi Directorate
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	hi
ISO 639-2:	hin
ISO 639-3:	hin
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Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी or हिंदी; IPA: ), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is one of the official languages of the Union government of India . It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, and Gujarati; on the south by Marathi; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Bengali; and on the north by Nepali. Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani termed khariboli, that emerged as the standard dialect. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Hindi.

Classification

Hindi is classified as a language belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It comes under the Indo-Aryan division of the Indo-Iranian branch of this family of languages.

Etymology

Of Persian origin, the word Hindī (ہندی) is comprised of Hind "India", and the adjectival suffix ī. Hence Hindī translates to "Indian". In modern times, Hindī as taken to mean "Indian" is obsolete; it now specifically refers to the language bearing that name.

Demographics

Area

Hindi is the predominant language in the states and union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Linguistic scholars refer to this area as the Hindi belt. Outside these areas, Hindi is widely spoken in cities like Mumbai, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, all of which have their own native languages but harbour large communities of people from various parts of India.

Local variations of Hindi are counted as minority languages in several countries, including Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK among various other countries around the world.

Number of speakers

Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, due to the large population of India. 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 337 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), Hindi/Urdu is 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.

Because of Hindi's extreme similarity to Urdu, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Hindi and Urdu are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Urdu would question their being counted as native speakers of Hindi, and vice-versa.

Official and social status

Official status

The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, declares Hindi in the Devanagari script as the "official language (rājabhāṣā) 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. 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. 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 i