Hindi, the native tongue of the people inhabiting the northern and central part of India, belongs to the Indo-Aryan or Indo-European group of languages. Hindi or its dialects are spoken by about 41 percent of the people of the country. An estimated 415 languages are considered to be living languages in India making India the home to a large number of languages. But the vast majority of the people, estimated to be about 74 percent, speak the Indo-Aryan languages while 24 percent speak the Dravidian languages. Another 1.2 percent speaks the Austro-Asiatic (Munda) languages while 0.6 percent the Tibeto-Burman. It is believed that there are still a few languages spoken by people living in parts of the Himalayas which are remaining to be classified.

India’s official language, besides English, is Hindi. One amongst the 22 scheduled languages of India, it is also an official language of Fiji. Fiji has about 48 percent of its people speaking various dialects of Hindi. Believed to have originated from Prakrit, Hindi evolved into local dialects including Awadhi and Braj. It finally evolved into Khari Boli later in the tenth century as the vernacular spoken in the Delhi region. Khari Boli got subsequently sanskritised to become Hindi and Persianised to become Urdu. The Persianisation took place over a period of about a thousand years when the Mughal kings ruled the region. Persian was the official language used by the Mughal rulers. Hindi is widely understood by the people of the neighboring countries of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Some sections of the people residing in South Africa, Singapore and Uganda also speak the language. Hindi-Urdu is ranked second after Mandarin (Chinese) amongst the languages of the world. It is spoken by some 429 million native speakers. A broad category of dialects are considered to constitute the Hindi language and consists of dialects such as Brij Bhasha, Khari Boli, Awadhi, Bundeli, Marwari, Kannauji, Magadhi, Maithili, Bhojpuri and Bihari languages.

However, there is the standardized Hindi which is taught in schools across India. The official Hindi used by the government is heavily Sanskritised with the Persian, Arabic and English words removed. However, the Hindi used in the media is more neutralized. The government of India officially has been promoting learn Hindi.

Both Hindi and Urdu are two forms of the same language back in the early 19th century. Hindi was written in the Devanagari script and Urdu was written in the Perso-Arabic script. Devanagari script was the script used to write Sanskrit. Much later Hindi and Urdu began to be considered as distinct languages.

In every nation, language plays an important role. It’s an expression of what a nation went through, who they are and what they’re going to be in the near future.

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