Introduction

Hindi is the national language of India. It is studied, taught, spoken and understood widely throughout the subcontinent, as a mother tongue for many people and a second or third language for others. Hindi is among the most widely spoken languages in the world. According to some estimates, about 500 million people in India and abroad are native speakers of Hindi. The total number of people who understand the language may be as high as 800 million.

Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is both the national language and the official language of the Union of India (along with English). Within India, it is also the official language of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital Territory of Delhi.

Hindi is used in literature, mass media, and education, while English is predominant in other spheres of life, such as international contacts, business, higher education, and science. In administration, politics, and the press, the two languages function alongside one another.

The Hindi language belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of the Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. The earliest representative of this branch is Sanskrit - the literary language of Ancient India. The Indo-Aryan languages of today are most often called New Indo-Aryan languages. This group includes Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Bengali, Nepali, and many others. Of all these languages, Hindi is most closely related to Urdu. The grammar and the basic vocabulary of the two languages are almost identical, the principal differences being only in the script and in the sources of borrowed words. Hindi has drawn much of its vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu in turn has drawn heavily from Persian and Arabic vocabulary. However, these differences are typical only in the written language and the formal style of the spoken language. The colloquial style is the same for Hindi and Urdu, leading some people to refer to them as one language called 'Hindustani' or 'Hindi-Urdu'. However, it would still be questionable to count Urdu speakers as native speakers of Hindi, due to the socio-political differences between Hindi (spoken by Hindus) and Urdu (spoken by Muslims).

The history of the Hindi language can be divided into periods:

The period of Classical Sanskrit - the language of the four Vedas - the most sacred of Hindu scriptures.
When Sanskrit ceased to be spoken as a native language, it was preserved by the numerically tiny political, religious, and literary elite. In its place, other literary languages emerged, including Prakrits and Apabhramshas. In 1100, the Modern Devanagari script emerged.
Standard Hindi, which is always written in the native Indian Devanagari script, developed out of a Western Hindi dialect called Khariboli which is spoken in the Delhi area. It was born from the antagonism between the Islamic and Hindu cultures, as a way to emphasize the differences between them.
Although many Indians converted to Islam, others joined in movements to strengthen the native Hindu traditions. One of the most powerful currents in the revitalizing of Hinduism was a tremendous surge in devotional enthusiasm for the worship of the gods Ram and Krishna. This era of this trend is called the bhakti period. This bhakti religious revolution within Hinduism worked to undermine the prestige of Sanskrit and the other traditional literary languages while stimulating the production of literature in Hindi and in its sister languages Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi.
At the beginning of the 19th century, which was also the beginning of the modern age of Hindi literature, the dialect of Delhi became dominant everywhere in the Hindi-speaking area. Under the guise of the Hindustani lingua franca, it was spread through the trading centers of India as the only Indian language wide-spread enough to be used for communication among people from the opposite ends of the subcontinent. At the very beginning of the 19th century, the British directors of the Fort William College at Calcutta even decided to support Hindustani.
After independence of India, the Government of India worked on standardizing Hindi. Their goals included the standardization of Hindi grammar, the standardization of Hindi spelling, and the standardization of Devanagari script.
In the two or three decades before Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi and others backed Hindustani for the national language in an attempt to bring about a compromise between supporters of Hindi and advocates of Urdu and other languages. The Hindustani espoused by Gandhi employed the standard grammar of Hindi and Urdu but was free of the more unusual words taken into Hindi from Sanskrit and into Urdu from Arabic and Persian. It was hoped that it would, therefore, be acceptable to all communities and ethnic groups. However, after Hindi received national status in India and Urdu received the same in Pakistan, the Hindustani movement disintegrated.