Portal:India/Today's selected article/May 14, 2006



Hindi. a Indo-European language spoken mainly in North, Central, and Western India, is one of the national languages of India. It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indo-Aryan family. Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani that was made one of the official languages of India. The grammatical description in this article concerns standard Hindi. It evolved from Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. As a standardised register of India, it became the national language of India on January 26, 1950. Hindi is often contrasted with Urdū. The primary differences between the two are that Standard Hindi is written in Devanāgarī which is written from left to right. The Devanagari script represents the sounds of spoken Hindi very closely, so that a person who knows the Devanagari letters can sound out a written Hindī text comprehensibly, even without knowing what the words mean and has supplemented some of its Persian and Arabic vocabulary, with words from Sanskrit; while Urdu is written in nastaliq script, a variant of the Persio-Arabic script, and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic vocabulary. (more...)