What is Hindi?

Hindi is a complete and ancient language spoken a large part of India, not including the east, and Pakistan.

The word 'Hindi' may be utilized to indicate either the language known as Hindi, the spoken communication found largely in India, or increasingly, to refer to the language of Hindustani, a word which also refers to a standard form known as Urdu.

The writing systems are the major distinction separating Urdu and Hindustani, and the large majority of people assume the two to be simply different inflections of the same language.

Hindi employs the Devanagari alphabet, a child of the earlier and very ancient Brahmic alphabet.

Devanagari was first used during the early 13th century. On the Fifteenth of August, 1947, the year of Indian Independence, marked the beginning of the standardization of the Devanagari script when diacritic marks were appended to help inscribe words from other languages in the Hindi written script.

Along with English, Hindi is one of the official tongues of India and there is a growing awareness of the lack of status the language holds among many speakers in India. Business is often transacted in English, and the media are growing more fond of it in their day to day broadcasts as well, placing Hindi further and further back into a 'secondary' position.

Sanskrit,is the origin of Hindi, going as far back as the fifth centure B.C.E. The oldest Hindi poet, Siddha Sarahpad, wrote his masterwork Dohakosh around 700 A.D. which aided to proclaim the era of Hindi as a stand-alone language.

A printing press was set up in the 1700's using the Devanagari script, permitting Hindi-language works to flourish. Independence in 1950 was when the constitution first spoke of Hindi as "the official language of the union."

Other languages have injected their influence into Hindi--languages as diverse as Dravidian, Arabic, English, and Persian. Vocabulary-wise it is very broad and deep, in particular when it comes to contemporary terms.

Where Hindi starts and Urdu ends is a contentious question, with expert linguists asserting it to be a socio-political/alphabetic dinstinction only. whereas many nationalists do not wish to identify them as almost the same language.

Hindustani, used as a generic term, has gained popular favor as a means of avoiding cultural prejudice towards one group or the other, and so is largely used in Bollywood movies, for example, that are big with audiences everywhere, in both India and Pakistan.

In general, term Hindi should be thought to refer only to the dialect spoken in India and printed in Devanagari, while Hindustani should ideally be thought to include the Urdu dialect spoken in Pakistan and printed in a Persian-derived script.