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Hindi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
हिन्दी, हिंदी
Spoken in: India, Fiji (Fiji Hindi), Pakistan Urdu, Mauritius (Hindi/Urdu), Nepal (Bhojpuri), Suriname (Bhojpuri), Trinidad and Tobago (Bhojpuri), Guyana
Total speakers: First language: ~ 500–680 million (2008)[1]
Second language: 120–225 million (1999)[2]
Ranking: 2 [Native]
Language family: Indo-European
Indo-Iranian
Indo-Aryan
Hindi
Writing system: Devanagari, Urdu, Kaithi, Latin, and
several regional scripts.
Official status
Official language in:
India (Standard Hindi, Urdu, Maithili)
Fiji (Fiji Hindi)
Regulated by: Central Hindi Directorate (in India),[3] National Language Authority (in Pakistan), National Council for Promotion of Urdu language
Language codes
ISO 639-1: hi
ISO 639-2: hin
ISO 639-3: hin
Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी or हिंदी, IAST: Hindī, IPA: 
[hɪnd̪iː] (help·info)) is the name given to an Indo-Aryan language, or a dialect continuum of languages, spoken in northern and central India (the "Hindi belt").[4]
Native speakers of Hindi dialects between them account for 41% of the Indian population (2001 Indian census). As defined in the Constitution, Hindi is one of the two official languages of communication (English being the other) for India's federal government and is one of the 22 scheduled languages specified in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution.[5] Official Hindi is often described as Standard Hindi, which along with English, is used for administration of the central government.[6][7] Standard Hindi is a sanskritised register derived from the khari boli dialect. Urdu is a different, persianised register of the same dialect.
History
Like many other modern Indian languages, Hindi has 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.[8] 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 (spoken as 'Hindi' in India). Since almost all Arabic words came via Persian, they do not preserve the original phonology of Arabic.
Hindi is contrasted with Urdu in the way both are written, and the use of Sanskrit vocabulary in higher registers. 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 Urdu 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.
Hindi is spoken mainly in northern states of Delhi, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar, but is understood alongside regional languages like Punjabi or Marathi throughout north and central India.
Hindi and Urdu
Further information: Hindi-Urdu controversy
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.
There are two fundamental distinctions between standard Urdu and standard Hindi that lead to their being recognised as distinct languages:
- the source of borrowed vocabulary (Persian/Arabic for Urdu and Sanskrit for Hindi); and
- the script used to write them (for Urdu, an adaptation of the Perso-Arabic alphabet written in Nasta'liq style; for Hindi, an adaptation of the Devanagari script).
Colloquially and linguistically, the distinction between the Urdu and Hindi is insignificant. This is true for the northern half of the Indian subcontinent, wherever neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used. Outside the Delhi dialect area, the term "Hindi" is used in reference to the local dialect, which may be different from both Hindi and Urdu.
The word Hindi has many different uses; confusion of these is one of the primary causes of debate about the identity of Urdu. These uses include:
- standardised Hindi as taught in schools throughout India,
- formal or official Hindi advocated by Purushottam Das Tandon and as instituted by the post-independence Indian government, heavily influenced by Sanskrit,
- the vernacular nonstandard dialects of Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu as spoken throughout much of India and Pakistan, as discussed above,
- the neutralised form of the language used in popular television and films, or
- the more formal neutralized form of the language used in broadcast and print news reports.
The rubric "Hindi" is often used as a catch-all for those idioms in the North Indian dialect continuum that are not recognised as languages separate from the language of the Delhi region. Punjabi, Bihari, and Chhatisgarhi, while sometimes recognised as being distinct languages, are often considered dialects of Hindi. Many other local idioms, such as the Bhili languages, which do not have a distinct identity defined by an established literary tradition, are almost always considered dialects of Hindi. In other words, the boundaries of "Hindi" have little to do with mutual intelligibility, and instead depend on social perceptions of what constitutes a language.
The other use of the word "Hindi" is in reference to Standard Hindi, the Khari boli register of the Delhi dialect of Hindi (generally called Hindustani) with its direct loanwords from Sanskrit. Standard Urdu is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem.
Urdu was earlier called Zabān-e-Urdū-e-Mu`allah (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ, ज़बान-ए उर्दू-ए मुअल्लह), lit., the "Exalted Language of the Camp". Earlier, the terms "Hindi" and "Urdu" were used interchangeably even by Urdu poets like Mir and Mirza Ghalib of the early 19th century (more often, however, the terms Hindvi/Hindi were used). By 1850, Hindi and Urdu were no longer used for the same language. Other linguists such as Sir G. A. Grierson (1903) have also claimed that Urdu is simply a dialect or style of Western Hindi. Before the Partition of India, Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad used to be the four literary centers of Urdu.
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 standardised 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.