HINDI LANGUAGE Information

The Hindi Language is the national language of India and is spoken by almost half a billion people in India and throughout the world and is the world's second most spoken language. It allows you to communicate with a far wider variety of people in India than English which is only spoken by around five percent of the population. It is written in an easy to learn phonetic script called Devanagari which is also used to write Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali. If you are interested in studying Indian culture, religion or current affairs then knowledge of the Hindi Language opens up the possibility of deepening your experience in a way which you can never attain though only English language sources.

The Hindi Language is written in the Devanagari script which is ranked as the most scientific writing system among the existing writing systems of the world. The Devanagari script is written from left to right and is a descendant of the Brahmi script which was well established in India before 500 B.C. The script is phonetic in nature and there is a fairly regular correspondence between the letters and their pronunciation.

The Devanagari Alphabet is used for:

• The Hindi Language is the official language of India
• Sanskrit, the primary South Asian classical language
• Marathi, the state language of the Indian state of Maharashtra
• Nepali, the official language of the Kingdom of Nepal

Note: It is also used for a number of other Indian languages and dialects and is closely related to most of the scripts in use today in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Tibet.

The literary history of the Hindi Language goes back to the 12th century. Some notable literary figures of Hindi are Kabir, Surdas, and Tulsidas. It also has an approximately three-century old, well-attested and rich grammatical tradition of its own. Hindi speaking regions: Himachal, Delhi, Haryana, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajsthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Pakistan, Bombay, Hyderabad. Also used in Bangalore, Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, United Arab Emirates.

Dialects of the Hindi Language: Marwari, Braj, Bundeli, Kanauji, Urdu, Chattisgarhi, Bagheli, Avadhi, Bhojpuri and many others. It is not easy to delimit the borders of the Hindi speaking region. There has been considerable controversy on the status of Punjabi and Maithili. Sometimes they are regarded to be independent languages and sometimes dialects of Hindi. A 1997 survey found that 66% of all Indians can speak Hindi, and 77% of the Indians regard Hindi as "one language across the nation".