Hindi

A Language of Ancient Indo-European Roots

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European language family, the same vast family that includes English, French, German, Russian, and Persian. It descends from Sanskrit, one of the oldest and most systematically documented languages in human history, through the intermediate stages of Prakrit and Apabhramsha — the vernacular languages spoken across the Indian subcontinent during the medieval period. Hindi as a distinct literary language began to take shape around the 10th century CE, flourishing through devotional poetry and courtly literature before gradually emerging as the dominant lingua franca of northern India. Today it is the official language of the Government of India alongside English, and the primary language of the vast Hindi Belt stretching across the northern and central plains of the subcontinent.

The Language of a Civilisation

India is one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations, and Hindi carries within it the accumulated weight of that extraordinary heritage. The language is inseparable from some of the most significant literary, philosophical, and devotional traditions in human history. The poetry of Kabir, Mirabai, and Tulsidas — composed in forms of early Hindi — continues to be read, sung, and celebrated across India today. Hindi literature flourished during the Bhakti movement of the medieval period, producing works of profound spiritual depth that shaped the religious and cultural identity of hundreds of millions of people. In the modern era, Hindi became a powerful symbol of national identity during India's independence movement, championed as a unifying language for a newly sovereign and extraordinarily diverse nation.

Hindi and Urdu — One Language, Two Scripts

Hindi and Urdu are in many respects the same spoken language — mutually intelligible in everyday conversation — yet they are written in entirely different scripts and draw their formal vocabulary from different sources. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and draws its literary and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script and draws heavily from Persian and Arabic. The shared spoken form of the two languages is sometimes called Hindustani, the common tongue that served as the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent for centuries and remains the basis of Bollywood films, which are understood and enjoyed by speakers of both languages across the world.

Devanagari — A Script of Remarkable Consistency

Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, one of the most widely used writing systems in the world, also employed for Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and several other South Asian languages. Devanagari is an abugida — a writing system in which consonants carry an inherent vowel sound that is modified or suppressed by additional marks. It is written from left to right and is notable for the horizontal line, called the shirorekha, that runs along the top of letters and connects them within a word, giving written Hindi its distinctive appearance. Unlike many writing systems, Devanagari is almost entirely phonetic — words are pronounced very closely to how they are written, making reading and spelling considerably more straightforward than in English or French once the script is learned.