Overview of Hindi Language

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly in India from its capital New Delhi westwards through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh states into Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Jodhpur and further southwards to Telangana. It is one of two official languages of India alongside with English and is also an official language of Nepal and several other minority communities around the world. As a member of the Indic family of languages, it has close linguistic connections to Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, and many modern Indian languages such as Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Magadhi Apabhramsa, Maithili, and several dozen others.

The name 'Hindi' comes from the ancient Persian word "hindī", meaning people who live across the river River Sindhu (Indus) which has been used since the Vedic period by Iranians living on both sides of this river. Hindi began as Sanskrit influenced Braj Bhasha in the early medieval era along with related dialects like Awadhi and Bundeli in northwestern regions before developing into High Hindi during Mughal rule in the 16th century. By mid-eighteenth century, standard colloquial Hindi was being referred to as "Modern Hindustani" based on development of written forms of various dialects in Ganges Valley on the basis of previous formulations and codifications of Skt/Prt vocabulary and grammar found in earlier literature. In the past few centuries, due to influences from foreign languages including Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Latin, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Filipino, Cambodian, Singaporean, Laotian, Burmese, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese, Tibetan, Pakistani, Afghan, Nepalese, Malaysian etc., modern Hindi contains lexical borrowings from these sources too.

Today, there are approximately 427 million speakers of Hindi worldwide making it the fourth most widely spoken native tongue after Mandarin, Spanish and English. Hindi is also spoken natively by some 90% of Indians and is used extensively in education, media broadcasting and cinema throughout India. In addition to its role within India, Hindi plays a significant part globally through organizations such as the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters), the Hindi Sansthan (Institute of Hindi Studies), and the Ravindra Bharati University. There have been numerous attempts at standardizing Hindi over time, resulting in different varieties of Hindi such as Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, Northern Hindi, Southern Hindi, Central Hindi, and Western Mithilanchal Hindi; however, all share the common feature of having evolved out of Old Hindi.