Hindi · हिन्दी

About Hindi

Language family

Indo-European, Indo-Aryan

Where it's spoken

Northern India

Speakers

roughly 600 million speakers including second-language use

Hindi grew out of Sanskrit-descended dialects of the Ganges plain and was standardized in the 19th and 20th centuries partly by drawing more heavily on Sanskrit vocabulary, in parallel with the more Persian-influenced Urdu standard built from the same spoken base. The two remain grammatically almost identical in casual speech and are sometimes jointly called Hindustani, differing mainly in script and formal vocabulary. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script shared with Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali.