Hindi Language

Hindi is a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people, mostly in northern and central India. It is one of the official languages of India, along with English. Around 600 million people speak Hindi, which makes it one of the most spoken languages in the world. Only English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish have more speakers.

Hindi is written in a script called Devanagari. Devanagari has 11 vowels and 33 consonants. Each letter stands for a sound, and the letters hang from a horizontal line drawn across the top, like clothes on a clothesline. People read Devanagari from left to right, the same way English readers do. The script is also used to write other languages, including Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali.

Hindi grew out of an ancient language called Sanskrit. Sanskrit was used in India more than 3,000 years ago, long before English even existed. Many Hindi words come straight from Sanskrit. Other words came in over the centuries from Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese, and English. Hindi and Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, started as the same spoken language. They sound almost identical in everyday conversation, but Urdu is written in a script based on Arabic.

In Hindi, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence. An English speaker says "I eat rice," but a Hindi speaker says something closer to "I rice eat." Nouns are masculine or feminine, even when they name objects. A book is feminine, but a house is masculine. There is no separate word for "the" or "a."

Hindi has shaped the English language too. Words like shampoo, jungle, pajamas, bungalow, loot, thug, and cheetah all came from Hindi or related Indian languages during the time when Britain ruled India.

Hindi is the main language of Bollywood, the huge film industry based in Mumbai. Bollywood makes more movies each year than Hollywood does. The songs, dances, and stories from these films have spread Hindi to fans all over the world, even in places where almost no one speaks the language.

Not everyone in India speaks Hindi. India has 22 official languages and hundreds of others. In southern India, languages like Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada are far more common, and many people there have pushed back against Hindi being treated as a national language. The question of which language should bring the country together is something Indians still debate today.