Encyclopedia
Hindi , an
Indo-European language spoken mainly in
northern and
central India, is the official language of the
Union government of India . It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by
Punjabi,
Sindhi,
Urdu, and
Gujarati; on the south by
Marathi; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by
Bengali; and on the north by Nepali.
Hindi also refers to a standardized register of
Hindustani termed
khari boli, that emerged as the standard dialect of Hindi. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Hindi.
Hindi is often contrasted with Urdu, another standardized form of Hindustani that is the official language of
Pakistan and also an official language in some parts of India. The primary differences between the two are that Standard Hindi is written in
Devanagari and draws its vocabulary with words from
Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in
Nastaliq script, a variant of the Perso-Arabic script, and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic vocabulary. The term "Urdu" also includes dialects of Hindustani other than the standardized languages. Other than these, linguists consider Hindi and Urdu to be the same language.
Classification
Hindi is classified as a language belonging to the
Indo-European family of languages. It comes under the Indo-Aryan division of the Indo-Iranian branch of that family of languages.
Demographics
Area
Hindi is the predominant language in the
states and union territories of
Himachal Pradesh,
Delhi,
Haryana,
Uttar Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh,
Bihar,
Uttaranchal,
Jharkhand,
Rajasthan and
Chattisgarh. Linguistic scholars refer to this area as
Hindi belt. Outside these areas, Hindi is widely spoken in cities like
Mumbai,
Chandigarh,
Ahmedabad,
Kolkata, and
Hyderabad, all of which have their own native languages but harbour large communities of people from various parts of India.
Local variations of Hindi are counted as minority languages in several countries, including
Fiji,
Mauritius,
Guyana,
Suriname,
South Africa and
Trinidad and Tobago.
Number of speakers
Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, due to the large population of India. According to the 1991
census of India , Hindi is the mother tongue of about 337 million Indians, or about 40% of India's population that year. According to SIL International's Ethnologue, about 180 million people in India regard standard Hindi as their mother tongue, and another 300 million use it as a second language. Outside India, Hindi speakers number around 8 million in
Nepal, 890,000 in
South Africa, 685,000 in
Mauritius, 317,000 in the
U.S., 233,000 in
Yemen, 147,000 in
Uganda, 30,000 in
Germany, 20,000 in
New Zealand and 5,000 in
Singapore, while the
UK and
UAE also have notable populations of Hindi speakers. Hence, according to the
SIL ethnologue , Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to
Comrie , Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world, with 333 million native speakers.
Because of Hindi's extreme similarity to Urdu, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Hindi and Urdu are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Urdu would question their being counted as native speakers of Hindi, and vice-versa.
Official and social status
The constitution of India does not designate any language as the
national language rather it says that Hindi is the official language of the Union of India . The eighth schedule of the Indian constitution also lists twenty-two languages being entitled to representation on the Official Language Commission.
Official status
The
Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, declares Hindi in the
Devanagari script the "official language of the Union" . It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965, with state governments being free to function in languages of their own choice. This has not, however, happened and English is also used along with Hindi for the official purposes. There was widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, in some states, especially the Anti-Hindi agitations in the state of
Tamil Nadu, which resulted in the passage of the Official Languages Act . This act provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes, by the Union government. However, the constitutional directive to the central government to champion the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced the policies of the Union government.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of several states such as
Bihar,
Jharkhand,
Uttaranchal,
Madhya Pradesh,
Rajasthan,
Uttar Pradesh,
Chattisgarh,
Himachal Pradesh,
Haryana, and
Delhi. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states.
Social status
While the Union government has sedulously promoted the spread of Hindi, its official status is not reflected in social importance. As with other south Asian language groups, even native speakers of Hindi, if elite, are usually facile in English. Education in English is a prerequisite for social status—hence the existence of several English medium "public" and Christian missionary schools in India. English remains the sole language of higher education in many of the fields of learning such as Engineering, Medicine and Science. There were numerous pro-Hindi agitations in the so-called Hindi belt as a reaction to the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu during the 1960's, but the movement
de facto called for an expurgation of English rather than actual promotion of Hindi.
Since the elite can use English, Hindi has been particularly weak on the Internet. As a barometer, the Devanagari fonts and keyboards used on computers today were not standardized within India - earlier government standards such as the 8-bit ISCII or the GIST keyboard were never widely adopted. The present system was finally standardized only during Unicode deliberations. Indeed, Hindi unicode standards were finalised based on inputs from scholars hailing from
Fiji and other countries. It is only when Unicode became the dominant standard that a were sought by the Indian government.
At the informal level , the use of Hindi has been growing, even among non-native speakers. Hindi is often used if the speakers in question hail from different linguistic provinces, especially if they belong to a social stratum that has not accessed a very good English education, and often even otherwise. Hindi movies have been playing a substantial role in popularizing the language all over the country. Popular Hindi TV serials do the same today. Seeing the popularity of Hindi,
BBC World Service started in 1940.
History
Hindi evolved from
Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the
Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi emerged, but c. 1,000 AD is commonly accepted. In the span of nearly a thousand years of Muslim influence, such as when Muslim rulers controlled much of northern India during the
Mughal Empire, many Persian and Arabic words were borrowed into Hindi.
Standard Hindi
After independence, the
Government of India worked on standardizing Hindi, instituting the following changes:
- standardization of Hindi grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee's report was released in 1958 as "A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi"
- standardization of Hindi spelling
- standardization of the Devanagari script by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing and to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters.
- scientific mode of transcribing the Devanagari alphabet
- incorporation of diacritics to express sounds from other languages.
Vocabulary
Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from
Sanskrit. Standard or
shuddha Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of
Hindustani, whose vocabulary contains words drawn from
Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from
English and other languages as well.
Vernacular Urdu and Hindi are practically indistinguishable. However, the literary registers differ substantially; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. It bears mention that in centuries past both Sanskrit and Persian have been regarded as the languages of the elite, even by those of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds.
There are three principal categories of words in Standard Hindi:
- Tatsam words: These are the words which have been directly lifted from Sanskrit to enrich the formal and technical vocabulary of Hindi. Such words have been taken without any phonetic or spelling change. Among nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit uninflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension.
- Tadbhav words: These are the words that might have been derived from Sanskrit or the Prakrits, but have undergone minor or major phonetic and spelling changes as they appear in modern Hindi.
- Deshaj words: These are words of local origin.
Similarly, Urdu treats its own vocabulary, borrowed directly from Persian and Arabic, as a separate category for morphological purposes.
Hindi from which most of the Persian, Arabic and English words have been ousted and replaced by
tatsam words is called
Shuddha Hindi . Chiefly, the proponents of the so-called
Hindutva are vociferous supporters of
Shuddha Hindi.
Excessive use of
tatsam words sometimes creates problems for most native speakers. Strictly speaking, the
tatsam words are words of Sanskrit and not of Hindi—thus they have complicated consonantal clusters which are not linguistically valid in Hindi. The educated middle class population of India can pronounce these words with ease, but people of rural backgrounds have much difficulty in pronouncing them. Similarly, vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic also brings in its own consonantal clusters and "foreign" sounds, which may again cause difficulty in speaking them.
Sociolinguistics of Hindi
Variants
Sociolinguists
have traditionally given what they call as four major
variants or styles of Hindi, viz.,
- High Hindi, the standardized Hindi , written in devanagari script, which contains numerous Sanskrit loanwords, including those introduced more recently to enrich the technical and poetical vocabulary or to replace words of Perseo-Arabic origin. Traditionally, this is the register spoken by the urban Hindu population of north India and is the form of Hindi taught in Indian schools and used in television news and newspapers. Today, High Hindi with many Persian, Arabic and English loanwords is the spoken form of this language in much of the north India, and is used in Hindi films, drama and television serials.
- Dakhini, spoken in the Deccan plateau region in and around Hyderabad, similar to but with fewer words derived from Perso-Arabic in its vocabulary.
- Rekhta, a form of used in poetry.
- Urdu, a variant of Hindi , but written in Perso-Arabic script. It utilizes a more extensive Persian and Arabic vocabulary and fewer Sanskrit loanwords, especially in its formal register. Before the Partition of India, 's linguistic area was similar to that of High Hindi, but it was more commonly spoken as a mother tongue by Muslims and was identified as a cultural expression of Islam in north India.
Additionally,
Hindustani is generally coined for the neutral style that is in-between High Hindi and Urdu and used in common speech.
Dialects
Hindi in the broad sense is a dialect continuum without clear boundaries. For example, both Nepali and
Panjabi are sometimes considered to be Hindi , though they are more often considered to be separate languages. Hindi is often divided into Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi, and these are further divided. Following is a list of principal Hindi dialects; many linguists regard only the dialects under Western and Eastern Hindi as proper Hindi dialects, and the rest as separate languages or sub-languages. The following listing is taken from Tiwari ; even he notes that the classification of the dialects under various branches and their classification as a dialect of Hindi or as an independent language depends upon the perception of the linguist.
Hindi region of the Indian subcontinentThis region includes the states of
Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar,
Delhi,
Haryana,
Rajasthan,
Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh,
Uttaranchal and
Jharkhand. Some people, such as the Government of India regards all the languages spoken in these states to be dialects of Hindi . Tiwari lists them under five groups:
- Western Hindi :
- Khadi boli or Sarhindi or Kauravi, originally spoken in western Uttar Pradesh and the Delhi region; the dialect that forms the basis of modern Standard Hindi. It is understood and/or spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan, the borders of Iran, to the borders of Burma, and in the south, it is understood in Sri Lanka. It is the almost the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent, irrespective of political boundaries or official policies. This is not a great difference between the dialects of Khari-boli and Hindustani.
- Braj Bhasha , spoken in south-central Uttar Pradesh, in the districts of Mathura, Agra, Aligarh, Dhaulpur, Mainpuri, Etah, Badaun and Bareilly. It has a rich poetic and literal tradition, especially linked with the Hindu divinity Krishna.
- Hariyanvi , spoken in the state of Haryana.
- Bundeli , the dialect of the districts of Jhansi, Jalaun and Hamirpur in Uttar Pradesh and Gwalior, Bhopal, Sagar, Narsinghpur, Seoni, Hoshangabad, etc. in Madhya Pradesh.
- Kannauji , the dialect of the districts of Etawah, Farrukhabad, Shahjahanpur, Kanpur, Hardoi and Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh.
- Eastern Hindi
- Awadhi , spoken in central and parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, in the districts of Allahabad, Fatehpur, Mirzapur, Unnao, Raebareli, Sitapur, Faizabad, Gonda, Basti, Bahraich, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh and Barabanki. The famous Hindu scripture Ramcharitmanas was written by Tulsidas in this dialect.
- Bagheli , spoken in the districts of Rewa, Nagod, Shahdol, Satna, Maihar, etc. in Madhya Pradesh.
- Chattisgarhi , spoken mostly in the recently created state of Chhattisgarh
- Rajasthani, mostly spoken in the state of Rajasthan, and also comprised of several notable dialects:
- Western Rajasthani or Marwari
- Eastern Rajasthani or Jaipuri
- Northern Rajasthani or Mewati
- Southern Rajasthani or Mewari
- Malwi spoken in Western-southern Madhya Pradesh.
- Pahari , the dialects of the Himalayan mountains
- Eastern Pahari, which includes Nepali, now considered a separate language
- Central Pahari, which includes Garhwali and Kumauni sub-dialects of the newly created state of Uttaranchal.
- Western Pahari, which includes the several sub-dialects spoken in Himachal Pradesh state.
- "Bihari"
- Bhojpuri , which is spoken in eastern Uttar Pradesh , western Bihar and a small part of Jharkhand . Some linguists like Dr. Chatterji consider it so different from the other two Bihari dialects that they prefer keeping it outside the Bihari group.
- Maithili , spoken in the East Champaran, Muzaffarpur, Munger, Bhagalpur, Darbhanga, Purnia and North Santhal Pargana districts of Bihar.
- Magahi/Magadhi , spoken in the districts of Gaya
...
, Patna, Munger and Bhagalpur in
Bihar state and Palamu, Hazaribagh and Ranchi in
Jharkhand state.
Depending upon perceptions, people also include various other dialects under Hindi, such as Nimari, Baiswari, Vajjika, Angika, etc.
Non-Hindi regions in the Indian subcontinent- Bambaiya Hindi, the dialect of the city of Bombay ; it is based on Khariboli dialect, but heavily influenced by Marathi and Gujarati. Technically it is a pidgin, i.e., neither is it a mother language of any people nor is it used in formal settings by the educated and upper social strata. However, it is often used in the movies of Hindi cinema , where it often gives a comical effect on the movie characters.
- Dakhini, as discussed above.
- Kalkatiya Hindi, another Khariboli-based pidgin spoken in the city of Calcutta , Shillong, etc., heavily influenced by Bhojpuri and Bengali.
Outside the Indian subcontinent- Tadj-Uzbeki, a term coined by Tiwari , for the dialect spoken by Indian immigrants from 13th century onwards in the border region of Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan . It seems to be based on the Braj, Hariyani and Rajasthani dialects, and is of course highly influenced by Uzbek, Tadjik and Russian languages.
- Mauritian Hindi, spoken in Mauritius, based on Bhojpuri and influenced by French.
- Sarnami, a form of Bhojpuri with Awadhi influence spoken by Surinamers of Indian descent
- Fiji Hindi, a form of Awadhi spoken by Fijians of Indian descent
- Trinidad Hindi, based on Bhojpuri, and spoken in Trinidad and Tobago by people of Indian descent
- South African Hindi, based on Bhojpuri, and spoken in South Africa by people of Indian descent.
Hindi and
The term Urdu arose in 1645. Until then, and even after 1645, the term Hindi or Hindvi was used in a general sense for the dialects of cental and northern India.
There are two fundamental distinctions between Standard and Standard Hindi that lead to their being recognised as distinct languages:
- the source of borrowed vocabulary ; and
- the script used to write them in .
Colloquially and linguistically, the distinction between the and Hindi is nearly meaningless. This is true over much of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent, wherever neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used.
Outside the Delhi dialect area, the term "Hindi" may be used in reference to the local dialect, which may be very different from both Hindi and .
The word
Hindi has many different uses; confusion of these is one of the primary causes of debate about the identity of . These uses include:
- standardized Hindi as taught in schools throughout India,
- formal or official Hindi advocated by Purushottam Das Tandon and as instituted by the post-independence Indian government, heavily influenced by Sanskrit,
- the vernacular nonstandard dialects of Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu as spoken throughout much of India and Pakistan, as discussed above,
- the neutralized form of the language used in popular television and films, or
- the more formal neutralized form of the language used in broadcast and print news reports.
The rubric "Hindi" is often used as a catch-all for those idioms in the North Indian dialect continuum that are not recognized as languages separate from the language of the Delhi region. Panjabi, Bihari, and Chhatisgarhi, while sometimes recognised as being distinct languages, are often considered dialects of Hindi. Many other local idioms, such as the Bhili languages, which do not have a distinct identity defined by an established literary tradition, are almost always considered dialects of Hindi. In other words, the boundaries of "Hindi" have little to do with mutual intelligibility, and instead depend on social perceptions of what constitutes a language.
The other use of the word "Hindi" is in reference to Standard Hindi, the
Khari boli register of the Delhi dialect of Hindi with its direct loanwords from Sanskrit. Standard is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem.
Urdu was earlier called
Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mu’allah, lit., the "Graceful Language of the Camp". Earlier, terms Hindi and Urdu were used interchangeably even by Urdu poets like Mir and
Mirza Ghalib of the early 19th century . By 1850, Hindi and Urdu were no longer used for the same language. Other linguists such as have also claimed that Urdu is simply a dialect or style of Western Hindi. Before the Partition of India,
Delhi,
Lucknow,
Aligarh and Hyderabad used to be the four literary centers of Urdu — none of which lie in present
Pakistan.
The colloquial language spoken by the people of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be , and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard .
These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that many extreme-nationalists, both Hindu and Muslim, claim that Hindi and have always been separate languages. The tensions reached a peak in the Hindi-Urdu controversy in 1867 in the then
United Provinces during the
British Raj. However, there were and are unifying forces as well.
Phonology
There are approximately 11 vowels and 35 consonants in Standard Hindi. They are shown below:
Vowels
The vowels of Hindi with their word-initial devanagari symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant ? , pronunciation in
IPA, equivalent in IAST and equivalents in British English are listed below:
| Alphabet | Diacritical mark with “?” | Pronunciation | | IAST equiv. | English equivalent |
|---|
? | ? | | | a | short or long Schwa: as the a in above or ago | ? | ?? | | | a | long Open back unrounded vowel: as the a in father | ? | ?? | | | i | short close front unrounded vowel: as i in bit | ? | ?? | | | i | long close front unrounded vowel: as i in machine | ? | ?? | | | u | short close back rounded vowel: as u in put | ? | ?? | | | u | long close back rounded vowel: as oo in school | ? | ?? | | | e | long close-mid front unrounded vowel: as a in game | ? | ?? | | | ai | long near-open front unrounded vowel: as a in cat | ? | ?? | | | o | long close-mid back rounded vowel: as o in tone | ? | ?? | | | au | long open-mid back rounded vowel: as au in caught
| |
Additional notes on vowels
- The short open-mid front unrounded vowel , does not have any symbol or diacritic in Hindi script. It occurs only as conditioned allophone of schwa. Thus, the pronunciation of the vowel ? occurs in two forms. When this vowel is followed by word-middle /h/, or it surrounds word-middle /h/, or is followed by word-ending /h/, it changes allophonically to short . In all other cases it is the mid central vowel schwa. Thus, the following words ???, ????, ?? are pronounced as , and and not as , and . It also occurs in loanwords from English, where it is sometimes accorded a new vowel symbol of ? . e.g., pen: ???.
- The short open back rounded vowel , does not exist in Hindi at all, other than for English loanwords. In orthography, a new symbol has been invented for it: ? . If included in Hindi phonology, it brings the number of phonemic vowels to 11.
- There are some additional vowels traditionally listed in the Hindi alphabet. They are
- ? , pronounced in modern Hindi as , used only in Sanskrit loanwords .
- ?? , pronounced as /??/. Its diacritic is used for a variety of purposes, consisting of vocalic nasalization, and the nasal consonants , , , , before another consonant. This leads to alternative Hindi spellings for the some words, e.g., the word Hindi itself has two spellings: ?????? and ?????.
- ?? , pronounced as . Used only in Sanskrit loanwords .
- The diacritic ?? , not listed in the alphabet, is used interchangeably with the anusvara to indicate nasalization of the vowel .
- If a lonely consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a halanta/virama diacritic below .
- There is less lip-rounding than in English in the long open-mid back rounded vowel . The vowel in Hindi is more central and less back than in English, like .
- All vowels in Hindi, short or long, can be nasalized, except ?. Barring exceptions, the nasalization is phonemic.
- In Sanskrit and in some dialects of Hindi , the vowel ? is pronounced as a diphthong or rather than . Similarly, the vowel ? is pronounced in some words as the diphthong / or rather than . Other than these, Hindi does not have true diphthongs—two vowels might occur sequentially but then they are pronounced as two syllables .
- In the devanagari script used for Sanskrit, whenever a consonant in a word-ending position is without a virama , the short neutral vowel schwa is automatically associated with it—this is of course true for the consonant when in any other position in the word. However in Hindi, even if the word-ending consonant is written without a virama, the associated schwa is almost never pronounced. The schwa may be pronounced very short only if the absence of schwa would otherwise make the pronunciation of the word very difficult — such a situation arises when there is a consonantal cluster at the end of the word. Thus, for phonological purposes, a word-ending grapheme without a halant or any other vowel-diacritic must be treated as consonant ending. The schwa in Hindi is usually dropped in khariboli even at certain instances in word-middle positions, where the orthography would otherwise dictate so. e.g., ????? is normally pronounced as , while according to the orthography, it should have been . . Schwa is never syncopated in the first syllable, but often syncoped in the second or the penultimate syllable — this of course reduces the number of syllables in the word. The syncopation of schwa is not phonemically contrastive.
The dropping of schwa at the end in Hindi causes a big problem for foreigners . The IAST
a appended to the end of these words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as or —this makes the masculine Sanskrit/Hindi words sound feminine. Some examples are given below:
| Hindi/Sanskrit word | Usual transliteration | Sanskrit pronunciation | Hindi pronunciation | English pronunciation |
|---|
| ???—a deity | Shiva | | | |
| ????—a deity | Varuna | | | |
| ???—a scripture | Veda | | | |
| ???—a hero | Rama or Rama | | | |
| ????????—a love manual | Kamasutra | | | |
| ????—an emperor | Ashoka or Asoka | | | |
The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association also describes the near-close near-front unrounded vowel the near-close near-back rounded vowel as occurring in Hindi phonology. They respectively occur as free allophones of short and .
Consonants
Hindi has a large consonant system, with about 38 distinct consonant phonemes. An exact number cannot be given, since the regional varieties of Hindi differ in the details of their consonant repertoire. To what extent certain sounds that appear only in foreign words should be considered part of Standard Hindi is also a matter of debate. The traditional core of the consonant system, inherited from
Sanskrit, consists of a matrix of 20 plosives, 5 nasals, and 8 sonorants and fricatives. The system is filled out by 7 sounds that originated in Persian, but are now considered Hindi sounds. The table below shows the phonology of the Hindi consonants. Note that all nasals, trills, flaps, approximants and lateral approximants in Hindi are regarded as voiced consonants, and that many linguists also call the
aspirated voiced plosives as breathy voice or murmur stops.
The 25 stop consonants occur in five groups, with each group sharing the same position of articulation. These positions in their traditional order are:
velar 
