Standard Hindi

Modern Hindi is mutually intelligible with the alternative register of the Urdu language. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialized contexts which rely on educated vocabulary. Because of religious nationalism since the partition of British India and continued communal tensions, native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert them to be completely distinct languages, despite the fact that they generally cannot tell the colloquial languages apart. The combined population of Hindi and Urdu speakers is the fourth largest in the world. However, the number of native speakers of Standard Hindi is still ambiguous. According to the 2001 Indian census, 258 million people in India regarded their native language to be "Hindi". However, this includes large numbers of speakers of Hindi dialects besides Standard Hindi; as of 2009, the best figure Ethnologue could find for Khariboli Hindi was a dated 1991 figure of 180 million. 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 stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two languages of communication for the Central Government.

It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351), |- |1. Mandarin Chinese (845 million) |- |2. Spanish (329 million) |- |3. English (328 million) |- |4. Hindi/Urdu (248.6 million) |- |5. Arabic (221 million) |- |6. Bengali (181 million) |- |7. Portuguese (178 million) |- |8. Russian (144 million) |- |9. Japanese (122 million) |- |10. German (90 million) |- |}

George H. J. Weber's estimate

George H. J. Weber's report on the number of native speakers of the top languages. Hindi captured 2nd position when counted together with Urdu.

History

Alphabet and vocabulary

Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Standard or shuddh ("pure") Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindustani, whose vocabulary contains many words drawn from Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from English and other languages as well. Actual Hindi (Devanagari) is spoken in the state of UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, MP, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand etc. Other states like Punjab, WestBengal, Orissa speak/use Hindi beside of their regional/state language. All over North, Central, East & West Indians use Hindi vastly. However, the literary registers differ substantially in borrowed vocabulary; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. Hindi has looked to Sanskrit for borrowings from at least the 19th century, and Urdu has looked to Persian and Arabic for borrowings from the eighteenth century. On another dimension, Hindi is associated with the Hindu community and Urdu with the Muslim community though this is much more a twentieth century phenomenon when the political impetus to actively distinguish Hindi from Urdu gathered pace amongst the educated Hindus driving this change. Prior to this it was the norm for both educated Hindu and Muslim Indians to be fluent in Urdu.

There are five principal categories of words in Standard Hindi: Tatsam (तत्सम् / same as that) words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections). They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindustani nām/Sanskrit nāma, "name"), as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. prārthanā, "prayer"). Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Among nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit uninflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension. Ardhātatsam (अर्धातात्सम्) words: These are words that were borrowed from Sanskrit in the middle Indo-Aryan or early New Indo-Aryan stages. Such words typically have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed. Tadbhav (तद्भव / born of that) words: These are words which are spelled differently from Sanskrit but are derivable from a Sanskrit prototype by phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit karma, "deed" becomes Pali kamma, and eventually Hindi kām, "work").

In its non-Sanskritized form, the Khariboli-based dialect is the normal and principal dialect used in the Hindi cinema. It is almost exclusively used in contemporary Hindi television serials, songs, education, and of course, in normal daily speech in almost all the urban regions of north India, wherever Hindi is also the state language. The rural dialect varies from region to region.

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography

Dictionaries

Further reading

External links

* Category:Hindustani Category:Indo-Aryan languages Category:Languages of India Hindi