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.

Hindi is the official language of India besides English. There are 22 scheduled languages in India and Hindi is one of them. Fiji, where some 48 percent speak dialects of Hindi, has Hindi as one of its official language. The origin of Hindi is said to be Prakrit. It developed local dialects like Braj and Awadhi and evolved into Khari Boli later in the tenth century. Khari Boli, the dialect spoken in the Delhi region, got Sanskritised to become Hindi. It also got Persianised to become Urdu. The persianisation was over a period of a thousand years when the region was ruled by the Mughal kings whose official language was Persian. The neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan also understand Hindi. Some sections of people in Uganda, South Africa and Singapore also speak the language. After Mandarin (Chinese), Hindi-Urdu is ranked second in terms of the most spoken language, spoken by about 429 million people. A broad variety of Hindi languages including Bundeli, Brij Bhasha, Khari Boli, Kannauji, Awadhi, Maithili, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Magadhi and Bihari languages together is considered to constitute the Hindi language.

Hindi language has been standardized for teaching in the schools across the country. The English, Persian and Arabic words have been removed from Hindi and the language further Sanskritised to develop and promote the official Hindi by the government. But the Hindi used by the media is more neutralized. The government of India has the official policy of encouraging people to learn to speak Hindi.

Hindi and Urdu were two standardized form of what is actually one language in the early 19th century with Hindi being identified with the Devanagari script while Urdu was identified with the Perso-Arabic script. Devanagari script was originally used to write Sanskrit. It was only later that Hindi and Urdu began to be treated as separate 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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