Hindi

The name Hindi is of Persian origin. The Persians used it to refer to the Indian people and to the languages they spoke. Scholars postulate that Hindi developed in the 8th-10th centuries during the period of Islamic invasions of northern India from khari boli, the speech around Delhi which was adopted by the Muslim invaders to communicate with the local population. Eventually, it developed into a variety called Urdū (from Turkish ordu 'camp'), characterised by numerous borrowings from Persian and Arabic, which became a literary language. In the meantime, the language of the indigenous population remained relatively free of borrowings from Persian and Arabic, and instead borrowed words and literary conventions from Sanskrit. This language became Hindi.

As a result of these different influences, Hindi is written in the Devanāgarī script and draws much of its vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdū is written in the Persian script and draws a great deal of its lexicon from Persian and Arabic. The two languages also differ in a number of relatively minor ways in their sound system and grammar. Both Hindi and Urdū have been used as literary languages starting in the 12th century. Under the influence of English, Hindi and Urdū literature flourished starting in the 18th century.

Hindi and Urdū have a common colloquial form, called Hindustani. Hindustani never achieved the status of a literary language, although Mahatma Ghandi used it as a symbol of national unity during India's struggle for independence from England.

Hindi is the primary official language of the Union government of India. It is the primary tongue of about a third of India's 1.09 billion people. Hindi became the official language of India on January 26, 1965, although the Constitution of India recognises English and 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit.

After the Independence of India from Britain in 1947, the Government of India undertook the standardisation of the language. In 1958, "A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi" was published as a result of the work of a government-appointed committee. In addition, Hindi spelling was standardised, and a standardised system of transcribing the Devanāgarī alphabet was devised.

For speakers of India's approximately 400 languages/dialects to function within a single country requires some common language. The choice of this language, known in India as the 'link' language, has been a sensitive political issue since independence in 1947. Efforts to reach a consensus on a single national language that is acceptable to all the diverse language communities have been largely unsuccessful.

Both Hindi and English are extensively used, and each has its own supporters. On the one hand, native speakers of Hindi, concentrated in northern and central India, assert that English is a relic from India's colonial past. In addition, since it is spoken mostly by the country's educated elite, it is too exclusive to be India's official language. Proponents of English, on the other hand, argue that the use of Hindi is unfair because it disadvantages those who have to learn it as a second language.

Education in English continues to be a prerequisite for social status. English remains the sole language of higher education in almost every field of learning. Code-switching between Hindi and English is extremely common, especially among the educated Indians.

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