Origin and Growth of Hindi Language India has an enormous diversity of languages and
dialects, yet only one is the official language
of India — Hindi. Today, Hindi boasts some 275 million speakers and ranks as one of the leading languages of the world. Knowledge of Hindi gives entry to one of the world’s great civilisations and to a culture in which tradition and modernity exist side by side. Hindi is a member of the Indo-Aryan language family; its ancestry goes back through Sanskrit to the Indo-European language, which is the basis of many of the world’s most important language families. Those students who feel that Hindi is too far removed from their European mind should take note: Hindi is a distant relative of English. Sanskrit (meaning refined or perfected) was brought to India from the north-east in approximately the 2nd millennium BC and eventually gave rise to the Prakrit (natural or common) languages. These in turn gave rise to the modern Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali and Sinhalese. The word ‘Hindi’ is known from as early as the thirteenth century. The language developed out of the structure of the dialect called Khariboli, interspersed with the vocabulary of Persian and Arabic during the period of Mogul rule (15th-18th centuries AD). Khariboli developed two distinct literary styles written in two different scripts; Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script and Hindi in the Devanagari. In its basic conversational form, Hindi is virtually the same language as Urdu (today the national language of Pakistan). The two languages diverge mainly at the level of higher vocabulary and perhaps more importantly in their scripts. The similarity between the two languages at conversational level (sometimes called Hindustani) makes learning Hindi doubly rewarding as the student is effectively gaining access to two languages at the same time! The Language and the Script The title ‘Hindi’ (originally a Persian word meaning ‘Indian’) actually embraces a wide range of dialects, the geographical extremes of which may be so diverse as to be mutually unintelligible. However the modern standard form of Hindi (based on the speech of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh) is widely accepted. Amongst its interesting features is a three-tier level of honorifics, allowing great subtlety in adjusting the level of communication to suit ‘formal’, ‘familiar’ and ‘intimate’ conversational contexts. Thus, the polite communicating of gratitude etc. is an intrinsic part of the language itself and does not rely solely on separate words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Hindi has inherited its writing system from Sanskrit. The Devanagari script is derived from the ancient Brahmi and is closely related to other Indian scripts such as Gujarati and Bengali. Devanagari is an extremely logical writing system, it has a phonetic basis so there are relatively few spelling problems. The general appearance of the Devanagari script is that of letters ‘hanging from a line’. This ‘line’, evident in many South Asian scripts, is actually a component part of most of the letters and is drawn as the writing proceeds. The script has no capital letters. Finally . . . English speakers rarely take time to ponder the origins of their familiar vocabulary. The results are often surprising: for example, did you know that juggernaut, dungarees and sherbet are all of Hindi origin????????????????????????????
SO HINDI IS MUCH WELL VERSED AND UPGRADED LANGUAGE THAN ANY LANGUAGE I DNT AGREE WITH CAT XAVI COMMENT THAT IT EVOLVES RECENTLY
