Language Atlas

How Languages Connect
Languages

Hindi

HIN-dee
Also Known As Hindi (Hindi)

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Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language, one of the two official languages of the government of India, standardized from the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region and written in the Devanagari script. Spoken Hindi and spoken Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, are close to mutually intelligible at the everyday conversational level, differing mainly in their formal and literary registers, where Hindi draws vocabulary from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic, and in script, Devanagari against the Perso-Arabic alphabet; whether Hindi and Urdu are one spoken language with two literary standards or two languages is a genuinely debated classification rather than a settled one.

Facts
ISO 639-3 Code
hin 1
Speaker Count
345,000,000 1
Figure is for first-language speakers of Hindi as Ethnologue counts it; Hindi and Urdu speakers combined, or Hindi second-language speakers included, both produce substantially larger and frequently cited totals.
Status
Living 1
Region
India 2
Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Arabic, Languages

This source names Arabic directly: "Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic, and in script, Devanagari against the Perso-Arabic alphabet; whether Hindi and Urdu are one spoken language with two literary standards or two languages is..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Sanskrit, Languages

This source names Sanskrit directly: "where Hindi draws vocabulary from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic, and in script, Devanagari against the Perso-Arabic alphabet; whether Hindi and Urdu are one spoken language with two..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

In Family

Written In

Sources
1. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
SIL International, 2024View the Source
2. Wikipedia: Hindi
Wikipediainfobox
Quote, infobox
Native to India
View the Source
2. Wikipedia: Hindi
Wikipedia
Quote
[ˈɦɪndiː]
View the Source
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2010
Glottolog
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyIn Family: Indo-EuropeanView the Source
Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Written In: DevanagariView the Source
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