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Hindi Kavita (Poem)
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Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language. Hindustani is the native language of people living in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan. Hindi is one of the official languages of India.
Colloquial Hindi is mutually intelligible with another register of Hindustani, (Modern Standard) Urdu, which is associated with the Muslim religion. The two varieties of Hindustani are nearly identical in basic structure and grammar, and at a colloquial level also in vocabulary and phonology. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts, which rely on educated vocabulary drawn from different sources; Hindi drawing its specialised vocabulary from Sanskrit, whilst Urdu does so from Persian and Arabic.
People who identify as native speakers of Hindi include not only speakers of Hindustani who are Hindu, but also many speakers of related languages who consider their speech to be a dialect of Hindi. In the 2001 Indian census, 258 million people in India reported Hindi to be their native language, as of 2009, the best figure Ethnologue could find for speakers of actual Hindustani Hindi (effectively the Khariboli dialect less Urdu) was a figure of 180 million in 1991.This makes Hindi approximately the sixth-largest language in the world.
Can You Learn Hindi
Please Come I Will Teach You Hindi
Official status
The Indian constitution, adopted in 1950, declares Hindi shall be written in the Devanagari script and will be the official language of the Federal Government of India. However, English continues to be used as an official language along with Hindi. Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission. The Constitution of India has effectively instituted the usage of Hindi and English as the two languages of communication for the Union Government. Most government documentation is prepared in three languages: English, Hindi, and the primary official language of the local state, if it is not Hindi or English.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Union Government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351), with state governments being free to function in the language of their own choice. However, widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, especially in South India (such as the those in Tamil Nadu), Maharashtra, and in West Bengal, led to the passage of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which provided for the continued use of English indefinitely for all official purposes. However, the constitutional directive for the Union Government to encourage the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced its policies.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi. Each may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, this language is generally Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several additional states
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Further information: History of Hindustani
The dialect upon which Standard Hindi is based is khadiboli, the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding western Uttar Pradesh and southern Uttarakhand region. This dialect acquired linguistic prestige in the Mughal Empire (17th century) and became known as Urdu, "the language of the court." As noted and referenced in History of Hindustani, prior to the independence of India and Pakistan, it was not referred to as Urdu but as Hindustani. After independence, the Government of India started to standardise Hindi as a separate language from Urdu, instituting the following conventions.
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standardisation of 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"
standardisation of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.
The Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi as the Official Language of the Union on 14 September 1949. Hence it is celebrated as Hindi Day.
In the year 1881 Bihar accepted Hindi as its sole official language replacing Urdu and thus became the first state of India to adopt Hindi.
